Festive music greeted the freshly open house of the Lillian Theatre. Bright lights shined down on comedian Jann Karam already bopping around on stage, doing stretches here and there, full of giddy excitement. Her hair is clipped up, the smell of paint is in the air, as she makes final touches on the set that serves as her residential work loft, populated by canvasses spread across the stage at various levels, surrounded by ladders and windows. Light grey photographer umbrellas hang from the ceiling in abstract clusters. The whole set blends fantastically with the exposed brick and vaulted ceiling of The Lillian. There’s an openness and liveliness one might expect at the opening of a new art exhibition, as the jubilant Karam dances, jumps around, and interacts with the packed house on closing night.
After the lights dim on the audience, she splashes some beige paint and comments, “Superior, that’s superior.” Of course, she is at least partly referring to her hometown of Superior, Arizona and the splotch of taupe is one of many strokes to come via brush, hands, or lobbing a $0.99 teddy bear smothered in black paint, which lands with a dark, comical thud on one of her works in progress. The details of her paintings are pretty blunt, to say the least, but the verbal elements of her childhood in a rural desert town are expressive and nuanced. She first describes her life in the form of a poem, as she inexhaustibly flits about the stage. But, as she delves deeper, she extinguishes the romance once imagined as a young girl who was quickly shaped by outside forces with no insight into her true needs. She employs hand-puppets (and hand-paintbrushes) and peaks from behind any space she can fit her little body into; as well, lighting cues spotlight stand-up comedy asides, which play into her trade as a comic.
In lesser hands, her self-deprecation may be too much of a weight for the audience to carry. She treads on very awkward and uncomfortable territory that many people fear confronting, yet her effervescent personality keeps you hooked and engaged. The staging feeds her kinetic energy, both literally and figuratively. She’s full of feisty mannerisms as she adeptly thumbs through her list of loser boyfriends while likening them to metaphors like frozen yogurt. She’s too much of a storyteller to make the play all about her, even though, on the surface, that’s exactly what it is, as she diagnoses her repeated behaviors while seeking reconciliation with the past.
As the performance progresses, naturally, both the stage and Karam accumulate more and more paint. She recounts the misinformation imposed on her growing up as well as the patterns that set her well into one failed relationship after another as an adult. As already referenced, the final paintings are quite crude in appearance. However, in the course of over ninety minutes, the audience has the full history and can identity with something in each one. There aren’t many actors doing what she is. And, in the space of Reclining Nude, Karam is able to spread her wings and realize her true potential as an artist. This venue fits her like a glove (at one point, she even ties an OJ Simpson joke to her history with domestic abuse).
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