Theatre in Review: ta-da! (Greenwich House Theatre)

	Josh Sharp. Photo: Emilio Madrid

The new show at the Greenwich House has a cast of one, but it's the story of a close, even tortured, relationship -- between a man and his screen. "Standup is bullshit," Josh Sharp announces, sweepingly dismissing the epidemic of solo comedy routines passing as legitimate theatre in the downtown scene. Such fraudulence is not for him: ta-da!, which is practically guaranteed to keep audiences in an uproar all summer, is, in contrast, a high-concept affair, starring Sharp, a projection screen, and two thousand slides.

While I doubt Sharp is armed with a Kodak Ektagraphic projector -- technology marches on, after all -- he does handle a clicker with the precision of an Olympic fencer wielding his foil. Indeed, the show requires him to step lively: As he notes, he has only an "industry-standard" eighty minutes to get through this oversized deck of images, mostly of them featuring words. Indeed, the projection design seems to have a life of its own, for example, sneaking in an advisory message about preferred pronouns or repeating a directorial note urging Sharp not to fear getting serious. Sometimes we get glimpses of the script in Google Docs format, revealing how practically every "er" and "uh" is accounted for. And we see keywords from the script behaving antically, shrinking to the vanishing point, swelling to menacing effect, and arranging themselves in ever-more-whimsical patterns. This may be the first show to make typography fun.

Such foolery is par for the course in ta-da!, which combines Sharp's halting coming-out story with some wild sexual adventures, a couple of only-in-New-York "minor gay-bashings," a touching account of his indomitable mother's passing, and his own near-death experience on a Mexico beach before veering into an explanation of quantum immortality theory (it's a thing), and ending with a nifty magic trick designed by Skylar Fox. It may be the busiest eighty minutes in town.

A pop-eyed scarecrow with an unruly haircut and a Southern accent that comes and goes like the summer wind, Sharp is an affable guide to his life's bizarre twists and turns. Highlights include his late coming out at 22 ("In my defense, I went to high school in the pre-Glee era"); his wayward attempts at going straight. ("There is no more desirable prom date for a burgeoning young woman than a closeted young man"), and, after he starts seeing men, the doctor who plays down an STD infection, noting, "It's a sign you're making friends." His account of "downloading" porn from his father's computer terminal, using a printer, is one of the funniest things I've heard in ages. And he turns an encounter with an abusive old woman on the subway into a riotous meditation on how everyone ends up nonbinary if they live long enough.

In some ways, ta-da! is a love letter to his parents, especially his mother, a gracious Southern lady who, with less than a year left to live, decides to "gently bully" him out of the closet. (Her opening gambit: "Being gay... I feel like that's something people are doing more of now.") His dad is equally accepting, even more so, considering the video clip of him standing next to Sharp at an Adele concert, lip-syncing to "Rolling in the Deep." A photo of his dad, staring adoringly at his mother, wearing a headscarf that unmistakably identifies her as a chemo patient, is a singularly beautiful thing; Sharp was very, very lucky in his parentage.

What's especially impressive about ta-da!is how Sharp links the loss of his mother and his brush with death in a way that never slides into sentimentality; he holds onto his skewed sense of humor no matter what, yet he understands the moments of grace that can carry one through the worst of times. All this, plus a cascade of memorably raunchy jokes, and those unruly, self-asserting projections.

With each new production, director Sam Pinkleton's solid sense of comic pacing continues to impress; clearly, his disciplined handling of Oh, Mary! is no one-off. For all its casual, freeform manner, ta-da! is the nerviest of balancing acts, and I suspect Sharp is lucky to have Pinkleton onboard. Meredith Ries' scenic design and Cha See's lighting are solid, but Stivo Arnoczy's co-video design (I assume Sharp is the uncredited collaborator) is the thing here; the images fly by at warp speed, pausing only to land a laugh.

Indeed, many of Sharp's funniest moments stem from his engagement with images of words; for example, an account of an "accidental happy ending" at a massage parlor shifts to his droll analysis of the establishment's ungrammatical title ("One Men's Spa"). Even here, however, his humor rests on a foundation of grace; underneath the wisecracks, ta-da! has something to say about the importance of living in the moment. The kid with the aborted middle-school magic act ("The Amazing Josh-O") is still practicing acts of legerdemain. --David Barbour