Reviews of Paul Budraitis and Mike Harris at Solo Performance Fest

Paul Budraitis' "Not. Stable. At all." Photo by Ian Johnston.

Wednesday last I was down at Theatre off Jackson for another evening of Solo Performance Festival 4, the month-long festival of local and visiting talent that continues this week with Gin Hammond's Returning the Bones, Suzanne Morrison's Your Own Personal Alcatraz, and Jeff Frieders' Kitty in the City. I went for a triple bill of Mike Harris, Paul Budraitis, and Norman Bell, and I have to admit that I didn't stick around for the roughly 40 minutes Bell presented of his evening-length work Subprime!.

Not that you should read that as a criticism. I've seen it and liked it, Bell having transformed his abortive employment at the East Side's Merit Financial—which became one of the first subprime lenders to collapse under the dead weight of its bundled securities—into a story that offers a very human insight into the people who helped cause this mess.

As for Paul Budraitis, just last month he raised the stakes for the Balagan Theatre as the director of David Mamet's Edmond. In terms of the performances he got from his actors as well as the staging, which made the poverty of fringe theatre a strength, it was a knock-out show that did just about everything it could have to make Mamet's over-wrought play soar, and compared well to the Rep's who's-who production of Glengarry Glen Ross. But to my knowledge, Budraitis has always been more of a director than a performer (or so he suggested in our interview), so I was extremely interested to see what he could do as a solo performer, and he didn't disappoint. My guest even declared Budraitis her new "theatre crush" for his work as an actor and a director, and coming from someone subjected to more theatre than any non-theatre person should be, that's saying something.

In Not. Stable. At all., Budraitis digs deep into the fear and paranoia that isolate us in the modern world, a subject that—less competently handled—could be a huge flop. But Budraitis the performer exhibits the same subtlety and control he did as a director. Budraitis is a a big guy, tall and broad and fairly imposing, which works well when he's projecting aggression, even bum-rushing the front row of the audience. But through subtle tweaks to his posture, the tension in his shoulders or the pursing of his lips, he switches quickly into comic or even vulnerable mode.

But whether funny or dramatic, Not. Stable. At all. aims for a very serious and dark point: you're not safe, no matter how much you close yourself off. In the various characters he adopts, Budraitis draws parallels between the police apparatus of a totalitarian state, and the threat it constitutes to the self, and the fear of emotionally exposing oneself that lets you walk past a distraught young woman sitting on a curb all alone at night. The dramatic shifts in tone all seek to disorient the audience and open them up to Budraitis' emotional assault. As a stand-up, he plays as disarming, talking to audience members about whether they own a house, asking increasingly specific questions about where it's located, complimenting them for their caution in not revealing the address, and then questioning their ability to afford the mortgage in such a bad economy. And just to keep pushing the question of how safe houses really are, in the last segment, he walks the audience through their response to the nightmare scenario of an intruder assault in one's own bedroom, building first the dread and then the panicked response to the attack itself.

Budraitis won't be performing the piece again as part of SPF 4 will be performing at SPF 4 one last time on March 31, and he is presenting it in June at Northwest New Works at On the Boards.

Mike Harris' Traveling Panties, on the other hand, has far less to recommend about it. It's most certainly an under-developed work, but I have to admit that I wonder whether the subject deserves the effort to improve it, as stories about sweetly insane people whose quirkiness provides laughs and whose simple-minded innocence provides insights are about a dime a dozen. Harris' character is a cross-dresser who hitchhikes the I-90 corridor and who, for reasons which will be revealed as though they're meaningful at the end, has taken a detour to a cemetery to recount his adventures to someone's grave. The humor is too crude to be endearing and too tepid to be edgy, leaving Harris to try to win over the audience with a character who just comes off as creepy.