ALL MY HOPES AND DREAMS
When I go to New York I generally find the performance work there tedious and self-important. But whenever Randolph Street Gallery brings in New York artists–Richard Elovich, Split Britches, and now Lisa Kron–I find the work exhilarating. Of course, the incredibly intelligent bunch at Randolph Street are responsible. They continue to provide some of the most intriguing programming in Chicago–it’s difficult to have a bad time there.
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Lisa Kron appears as part of Randolph Street’s entertaining “In Through the Out Door” series, featuring lesbian and gay performances and multimedia art. Kron’s piece, All My Hopes and Dreams, is fundamentally an evening of stand-up comedy and humorous anecdotes (she even refers to herself disparagingly as the lesbian Garrison Keillor). But while most stand-up comedians present such slickly packaged material that they seem to be on autopilot, Kron’s approach is wonderfully clunky and pedestrian. Her set is a card table and stool. She can’t dance–though she gives it all she’s got–and she can sing only so long as the notes don’t go too high. She continually lets us know that her piece could fall apart at any minute.
The remarkable thing about Kron’s performance, however, is that even though she spends the evening with a sarcastic smile on her face, a certain candor and sincerity shine through. Clearly she’s in love with performing, sharing her humorous anecdotes with a lesbian and gay audience (though she does include one section specifically for straight women: an unbelievably bad poem from Cosmopolitan called “Business Love”). That candor makes her instantly likable. So when she simply shows us the photos in a calendar made by a trash-can company, an act anyone could do, it becomes truly hysterical.
