Cry Baby

Before Isabella Perversi’s arrival on stage, we peer at a very small television screen showing clips from movies in which an actor cries.  Her program notes tell us that 96% of female Oscar winners ‘have cried in their performance’.  So… is crying a good thing, a bad thing, a revelation of vulnerability, a manipulative thing, a game-player tactic, a sign of neurosis, or of self-absorbed self-pity?  For Perversi, it’s a disability that is ruining her life.  The show explores such questions, although the central question is, ‘Why can’t I stop crying?’  The obverse of which is, ‘What makes me happy?’

Perversi, a clearly talented, experienced performer, comes on stage blindfolded.  That suggests (to me) straight off that she’s groping in the dark as she tries to put together her show about crying and why she cries and why she can’t seem to stop.  (Although she does not cry during the show.)  The stage is littered with screwed-up pieces of paper, ideas for the show she’s already rejected.  She will screw up more pieces of paper as she is seized with inspiration… only to realise this or that idea is/was crap.

She floats the idea that maybe her show could be made up of whatever she’s always wanted to do on stage in a show.  A few songs, poems, dance, sock puppets.  At this point, we may feel a slight anxiety.  She is making a show out of not knowing how to put together a show.  That’s okay, it could work.  Essentially, Cry Baby is a stand-up routine (it will reappear at the Melbourne Fringe Festival in October), and self-depreciation is a standard trope of the stand-up comedian. 

But there’s confected self-deprecation (‘I’m such a klutz, but aren’t we all?’) and then, on the other hand, there’s genuine, confessional self-deprecation.  The latter can rather easily tip into self-pity – a pretty unattractive quality in any performer.  At times, Cry Baby veers in that direction, unleavened by humour. 

Perhaps the problem is the random feel of the assembly of items.  At one point, Perversi suddenly takes a microphone into the audience to ask various people what makes them happy.  On my night, people were startled and struck dumb.  Gillian Cosgriff asks the same question in one of her shows – and gets answers, and has fun with it, because she gently sets it up and invites audience response. 

Here, we do get songs, poems, dance and, yes, sock puppets.  The dance numbers (Perversi is a trained dancer) erupt on stage with manic bursts of desperate energy that seem to leave her exhausted.  The sock puppets are surprisingly expressive and moving without a word of dialogue.  But their appearance seems to start and finish without much connection to anything else.  Similarly, Perversi rewrites and sings very movingly Jerry Leiber’s lyrics of the Peggy Lee standard, ‘Is That All There Is?’ 

But is it moving because of the words or Mike Stollar’s music?  Are the rewritten lyrics autobiographical?  They sound as if they are.  But then, that autobiography seems to be at odds with other strands of autobiography in the show.  Dancing doesn’t make her happy – but then it does.  Are we seeing Perversi, or a persona created for this show?  It’s unclear what the ‘rules’ are in this show.  But the song, with its theme of disillusionment, is a good choice because it goes to the show’s central question, ‘Why do I keep crying?’

The answer to that question might be, indeed, disillusionment (but in the song, Peggy Lee is sad, but she isn’t crying), or it could be an inability to connect with others – that is, existential loneliness, or – and we come back to it – self-pity.  The other question – what makes me happy – is answered, but it feels tacked on in terms of what precedes it.  What’s needed is a dramatization of – or a build to - the realisation of what makes Perversi (or the Perversi persona) happy.

Cry Baby is a work in progress.  Works in progress are the generous point and purpose of the La Mama Explorations program.  Perversi and her director, Fabio Motta (?) are trying out the material and asking for feedback.  The above is mine.  In short, what seems to be the random assembly of items is jarring.  Writer and director know the show is not ‘cohesive’ (yet).  Dramaturg Emma Fawcett may need to get tough.  Could there be bridges between the items of a rearranged running order?  And – big ask – more humour to counteract the ‘poor me’ feel?

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Darren Gill