One and Only

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The minimal definition of drama is one actor on a bare stage, emoting. Perhaps not surprisingly in a century devoted to minimalism in every area of the arts -- and lately to downsizing in every area of commerce -- producers and performers are increasingly taking that definition literally. Broadway box office is dominated by maximalist musicals known to cynics as the helicopter show (Miss Saigon), the chandelier show (The Phantom of the Opera), the barricades show (Les Miserables) and the zoo story (Cats). But occasionally on Broadway, and incessantly off it, this is also a heyday of the one-person show.

Topics range just as broadly as in more elaborate drama, from the orphanage hardships of Boys Town to the comic angst of Jewish suburbia, from Edith Wharton's frustrated sex life to Lynn Redgrave's thwarted longing for her father's esteem, from the Los Angeles riots to personal calamities of illness and grief. Actors vary from the well-established (Redgrave, three-time Tony Award winner Irene Worth and Regina Taylor of TV's I'll Fly Away) to the + succes d'estime (Eric Bogosian, Anna Deavere Smith) to the yearning-for- discovery (Sherry Glaser, Claudia Shear, Barnaby Spring). Some play a multitude of characters, some just one, and several basically play themselves. Some, like Spalding Gray, who in January finished a return engagement on Broadway and is coming back in June, devote themselves principally to the solo form. Others, like John Leguizamo, who was named last season's best performer off-Broadway for his Hispanic family portrait Spic-O-Rama and who appeared in the films Carlito's Way and Super Mario Bros., seem less exclusively committed to the stage.

The one thing almost all solo actors have in common is that they are also the authors of their shows; they seem drawn to the form as playwrights even more than as performers. Economically, they improve their prospects of getting produced because one-person shows involve fewer salaries -- onstage, obviously, but also backstage -- and require less scenery and costuming. Artistically, these actor-authors have bargaining power to keep their visions intact. Says Evangeline Morphos, a producer of Blown Sideways Through Life, Shear's account of getting and hating 64 jobs: "If you finance a one-person show, you basically buy into the creator's view of the world. The words and delivery are their sense of reality. And you market the personality as much as the play."

For audiences, the payoff varies. When a performer's piece is largely autobiographical, like Shear's or Redgrave's (which ran eight months on Broadway and is touring the country), the theatergoer can get the illusion of making an instant friendship. When the show is a bravura display of physical and vocal transformation from one character to another, like Glaser's deft Family Secrets or Spring's intensely acted if mawkishly overwritten The Mayor of Boys Town, the pleasure is seeing the conjurer's trick. When the writing is ambitiously literary, as in Taylor's eloquent if not galvanically performed pseudo memoir Escape from Paradise, the stimulus is intellectual -- discerning a family and a world from fragments of recollection.

Rare performers, like Bogosian, combine many of these charms. His Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead is part sketch, evoking several varieties of his trademark sociopath, and part musing in his own voice about the price of fame and about how the world seems to be going to hell just when he is getting rich enough to enjoy it. His command of language, including the rhythms of scatology and epithet, sometimes soars to the level of David Mamet, and his mutations are always convincing without any need for props or disguises.

The richest rewards come from watching Smith, whose technique is to explore an explosive public event by interviewing hundreds of participants and then impersonating dozens of them, using only their distilled words. As writing it resembles journalism, but in performance -- as she takes on all races, ages and genders -- the impact is that of elegiac art. While in theory each character could be portrayed by a different actor, Smith regards it as essential to have all of them embodied by one person who also remains unmistakably herself, a black woman: "I think the form speaks to the content. It says something about how we can relate to each other."

Smith burst into the national consciousness with Fires in the Mirror, which played off-Broadway and around the U.S., became a finalist for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in drama and was adapted for PBS. That piece took on a confined conflict between blacks and Jews in Brooklyn. Her new Twilight tackles the complex sociology of the Los Angeles riots. After a spellbinding debut there, it has been revised and restaged for an off-Broadway run starting next week, with a transfer to Broadway planned for April.

The scope of Twilight is far removed from the simplicity of one-person shows of a generation ago, mostly readings at a lectern. Sometimes the performer impersonated the author with costume and makeup, as Hal Holbrook did in evoking Mark Twain. Sometimes an actor merely read passages stirringly, as Eileen Atkins did for Virginia Woolf. Worth is now doing the same for Wharton; she just ended an entrancing off-Broadway run and has upcoming dates in Princeton, New Jersey, and at London's Royal National Theatre. "I am not remotely taking on Wharton's persona," Worth says. "I never met her. I don't know what her voice was like. I am giving feeling to her words. After having so much plot and emotion spoon-fed to them by theater or opera, audiences seem to like having to concentrate on those words and use their imaginations."

What these shows generally lack, for all their charm, is conflict. Acting, an aphorism of the craft holds, is reacting -- responding spontaneously to what another actor says or does. In one-person shows, that essential tension is missing. Every confrontation feels contrived. No villain or even annoyance gets a fair say. If one-person shows can feel as candid as a session on the psychiatrist's couch, they can also be just as narcissistic.