Theater Review: the curious, meticulous, comic art of Hannah Gadsby

Douglas

Written and performed by Hannah Gadsby

 While much of the audience responds to the 90 minute Douglas as it would any stand-up comedy act, it is not so easily classified as such. You get this sensation on arrival. You’re told that the performance is 1 hour 45 minutes (really long for comedy) and that the theater is cellphone-free. At the request of the artist, all cellphones are locked up in a little pouch (which you keep) so cannot then be accessed until a special magnet is applied to the lock on exit (there are side exits for cell phone emergencies). The stage has the prototypical comic’s stool and microphone, but also a curious ceramic dog (actually made out of crayons, we are later told)—this is the dog Douglas of the title, but rarely mentioned in the act. Ms. Gadsby enters the stage without ceremony, dressed in shlumpfy clothes, and starts talking without much introduction. She spends the first 10 minutes precisely outlining what she will do during the show, rather like a lecturer showing a Powerpoint outline before she starts. This was all curious, not really funny, yet the audience around me laughed and shrieked as if it was, doubtless primed for a good time by her viral hit Nanette on Netflix, perhaps the most discussed comedy act of the last year. All this for a comic little known except in her native Australia until last year. I wondered if I would enjoy this at all, since I was not a pre-primed fan. My emotions 15 minutes in reminded me of sitting in a movie theater bored by an Indiana Jones movie while the entire theater screamed and rocked, or painfully enduring a Sex Pistols concert in the 1970's while their fans rocked out. 

But things soon got far, far better. It turns out that Ms. Gadsby is one of the most honest performers I have ever seen. She soon announces she is on the autism spectrum, explaining her need for order, cellphone security, and the preliminary performance outline. She also apologized in advance for times when she lost her train of thought, most likely if distracted by the audience. This also meant there would be little of the usual audience banter common to most comics. Her autism gives her a different filter on the world than we usually see on the comic stage, and led to a direct, unvarnished, raw, and sometimes painfully honest 90 minutes unlike anything I had seen a comic do before. Several common themes emerged. She is furious at the way women, GLBTQ, and spectrum folks are treated and overlooked, and talks about it honestly and hilariously. She is ruthless about her own foibles, thus joins my favorite comedians who can laugh at themselves while piercing society and others. While some of the performance was typical stand-up with short funny vignettes, other parts became extended lectures (using art history slides hilariously) that demonstrated society’s marginalization of women and anyone perceived as different. She is pissed off that men have been able to name and classify everything for their own benefit. Women’s genitalia, for example, are largely given dirty curse words in slang. She refuses to use the word “cunt” to describe the vagina, since it is such a low and vile word---instead she uses it to describe male suburban white golfers, which she finds appropriately low to warrant the word. In other examples she shows how western male cultures has denigrated women. For example, she amusingly showed how the Graces, invented by the Greeks to exemplify the arts, were later turned by male Renaissance painters into naked cuties cavorting in the forest. She also points out the unfair use of “hormonal” to describe women’s unexpected behavior, as if men were not also governed by hormones and also engage in dysfunctional behavior. But as they assault or kill one another, this is written off simply as “boys will be boys”. 

Common to many on the autism spectrum, Ms. Gadsby is particularly obsessed, confused, and fascinated by colloquial speech and words in general. She told a funny story about how during a fantasy role-play during lesbian sex, her partner asked her to envision them rolling around in a “little cabin on the water”. Hannah immediately became distracted, wondering why the apparently floating house did not sink, and whether sex would be enjoyable if you got all soaked and waterlogged. This lover later left her, saying Hannah made no effort to understand how normal people talk and think. A related story came from her childhood, when a teacher instructing the class on prepositions asked them to think how they could be related to a black box, e.g. inside it, beside it, over it, etc. Hannah became confused, not understanding how she could be actually related to a box, so asked persistent and annoying questions about whether the box was male or female, what kind of hair it had, or the color of its skin. She was sent to the principal for insubordination and disruptiveness. Stories like these gave fresh insight into the life of a person whose wiring is a little different, and she challenged the audience to meet her (and others) halfway. Ms. Gadsby’s attention to organization (e.g. the pre-comedy synopsis) led to a structural integrity unique to her comic styles. Wonderfully, almost all of her word obsessions, stories, vignettes and introduced characters reappeared later in the show, as part of a superb wrap-up and reminder of her “teaching points”. These was accompanied by a flurry of art history painting slides, somehow hysterical in bringing the show to a rousing climax. 

This was a show that was not just about being autistic, lesbian, and female, but somehow encompassed her thought processes into the organization and structure of the show itself. This meta-concept allowed us to more fully enter her world, live in it, and not consider it so foreign. This is a wonderful show that I encourage you to see if it comes to your town, or when it is inevitably released on Netflix.