Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha, now playing at the Public Theater after successful runs at the Edinburgh Fringe and the Soho Playhouse, is the kind of sui generis solo performance that will have you doubled over with laughter one moment, and then pondering some of life’s deepest questions the next. This brilliant piece of theater is the brainchild of Estonian-born performer Julia Masli, who has an almost spectral presence on stage. She’s clad in an architecturally draped outfit (designed by Alice Wedge, Annika Thiems, and David Curtis Ring) with an equally elaborate headpiece that suggests a visitor from another galaxy. The fact that she also wields a microphone on a bronzed manikin leg that’s rigged over her left arm adds an additional layer of absurdity. But more than her appearance is her presence, which can shift from sweet to impish to vaguely menacing in an instant — an affect that’s enhanced by her heavily accented voice.
She spends the entirety of this uniquely disarming show engaging with her audience, singling out individual members with an initial inquiry — “Problem?” — that she delivers in a sing-song where the second syllable rises nearly an octave. Despite all appearances, Masli seems genuinely interested in people’s problems — and she turns the evening into a hilarious and probing group therapy session.
At the performance I attended, a man who complained about exhaustion was ushered onstage and placed in a bed that had been idling just offstage, then outfitted with headphones and an eye-mask. (He had to be nudged awake about a minute after Masli had taken her final bows and left the stage.) Another spectator was lured on stage, along with a stranger seated in her row, to rehearse what she should say to break up with the guy she’s been seeing for the last three months. Still another said she missed her family in Texas and was nudged into calling her grandmother — resulting in a speaker-phone chat in which the young woman’s nonny opened with “It’s taken you two years to call!”
Masli is careful to respect boundaries, retreating when one woman expresses reluctance to discuss painful memories that trouble her. But she also flashes a bit of the trickster, smashing one attendee’s front-row chair in a burst of rock-star fury and then charging that same person to rebuild the chair upstage with a tool cart that she wheels out for just that purpose. In other instance, she rebukes a man who insists he’s “doing OK today” — kicking him out of the auditorium altogether with the explanation, “You’re free. This is a show for people with problems.”
Indeed, this is a show for people with problems — which is, in the end, all of us. Amid the clowning, and the ominous declarations of basic truths (“All of your family and all of your friends are going to die”), Masli offers some surprisingly thoughtful insights into the things that nag at us during the day and keep us up late into the night. When a man confesses that he feels overwhelmed by his boss’s demands on his time, she earnestly intones, “Why do they decide your life? What would you rather do?” Other times, she crowd-sources solutions to a problem — drawing the rest of the audience into the task at hand.
Masli is a phenomenon, wandering the aisles of the theater like an ethereal Phil Donahue and drawing a group of strangers into a communal experience that feels oddly intimate, confessional, and therapeutic. She’s a compelling mix of types — in addition to Donahue, her performing styles includes elements of Samuel Beckett, Andy Kaufman, Laurie Anderson, Bill Irwin, and absurdist European clowns. Working with a production that includes enchanting work by sound designers Alessio Festuccia and Sebastián Hernández as well as lighting designers Lily Woodford, Jennifer Fok, and Sarah Chapin, Masli builds to a stunning finale that remixes elements of the night’s performance with astounding poignancy (which is all the more remarkable since no two performances will ever be quite the same, by design). I haven’t laughed so hard, or felt so deeply, in a very long time. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha finds not only humor, but humanity, in the dark. ★★★★★
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
Public Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 70 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through June 22 for $54
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