Move over, Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The creator of Fleabag has some competition in Liz Kingsman, a twentysomething British comedian and writer whose viciously funny One Woman Show skewers all the conventions of the young female storyteller — while also embodying all the tropes of a woman seeking to turn her personal experience and insecurities into fame and fortune.
The show, which opened Wednesday at Off Broadway’s Greenwich House Theatre after an award-winning run on London’s West End, is an audaciously meta, uproariously funny and brilliantly satirical send-up of both comedy and “content production.” And Kingsman, wearing black overalls and her hair pulled back in pigtails to reinforce her manic pixie dream-girl persona, is a bold avatar for the contradictory impulses of the Gen Z creative class.
Kingsman’s unnamed narrator embodies all the tropes of Waller-Bridge and her imitators, the kind of young, self-aware female artists who have become all the rage in recent years. “We need women’s story,” she tells the audience, later adding, “They still haven’t decided which woman is going to be successful this year.” What elevates her material is that she simultaneously shatters her own pretensions, with cutting, often absurdist reveals and telling asides from her character’s bland best friend from college and her Aussie boss (“You’re not a mess, you just want to be seen as one”).
Kingsman’s naked ambition — she willfully ignores the audience in places to focus on two cameras that are supposedly recording the performance for producers she hopes might want to turn her show into a TV special — bumps up against her self-conscious desire to be relatable. And that tension is deliciously explored throughout the 70-minute show, bolstered by Kingsman’s onstage confidence and fondness for the inane. (She crushes on an “8-foot-9-inch Adonis” who turns out to be an unworthy suitor for well-rooted reasons, and sips from side-stage water bottles that grown in size, ending up with a giant water-cooler filler.)
What’s more, One Woman Show is funny. Laugh-out-loud funny, the humor springing from a variety of wells until the stage, the theater, the entire city seems to be soaking in a firehose of laughter.
