The Accidental Pervert

photo by piff_clayborne

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According to the program, The Accidental Pervert is a show with quite a history. The first performance was in 2005 and since then it had multiple runs in different theaters in New York, as well as clubs and bars around the country. It was performed in Panama, Malta, Switzerland and Norway. It’s going to have a full production run in Germany, Austria, Estonia and Norway in 2016.

I didn’t know all of that when I decided to go. I purposefully try not to set my expectations too high. One person shows are especially risky and are easy to dislike. If the actor doesn’t hit the right emotional note the mistake is more noticeable than in ensemble. And Andrew Goffman just wasn’t hitting it at all.

We enter Thirteenth Street Repertory Company located in the cellar of a brownstone and find ourselves surrounded by the atmosphere of old school off-off-Broadway theater. Antique tickets booth reminiscent of a mechanical fortuneteller booth on Coney Island, the art in the foyer by Lou Patrou, a little bar, a restroom the size of the locker – everything screams “west village” and suddenly feels like home.

Robert Vest poses as a host greeting everybody personally and entertaining a group of Russian ladies who came early. He continues his act on stage prior to the show to “warm up” the audience with some rather vulgar jokes about front and rear exits of the theater pointing at his anatomy accordingly. My friend and I are getting suspicious while taking seats in the second row. It turns out that it wasn’t an unnecessary precaution, the girl who was sitting in the first row in front of me got a lot of winks and comments and practically a lap dance at one point.

Now I must say that I feel very uncomfortable when my presence as an audience not only gets acknowledged but when the performer constantly and actively demands my attention and my approval. Obviously a performer depends on his audience, especially in comedy. But never, not even on a stand up comedy night, was I forced so badly to smile and clap politely at the jokes I didn’t like much. But I was smiling and occasionally clapping because of the pity I felt for Andrew Goffman. Fake smiling made me yawn which resulted in more awkwardness and discomfort. Newer has a show seemed so long and unbearable! 

It’s a story about an 11 year old boy discovering his dad’s collection of XXX VCR tapes, which started his obsession with porn. He goes on about his early masturbation experiences and sexual fantasies about his housekeeper for a while. Saying the names of the porn movies, which are rephrased names of non-porn movies and books, seems to make Goffman the happiest. He would say “Star Whores” and make a long pause for audience to laugh. If nobody made a peep he would say something like: “Come on, this was a good one!”

An 11 year old kid obsessed with masturbation trapped in the body of an aging man – that’s what the character of Andrew Goffman is. And even as the story progresses to wild college sex experiments with an Italian woman named Dena and his experience of being a husband and a dad, we are still listening to a little bastard who, more than anything in the world, likes to rub his penis. There is a “character arch” and supposed transformation into the grownup man who realizes that he feels content with his wife and his daughter and doesn’t need porn anymore. But it didn’t show in the performance of Andrew Goffman. We hear the voice of a self-centered demanding child until the very end.

Goffman seemed worn out. It appeared he couldn’t keep up with the upbeat tempo of the show, which was unnecessary and exhausting, not only for the performer, but for the viewer too. You can’t have only high peaks in your show, you need to lead to them gradually and give it some time afterward to build to the next emotionally charged moment.  The Accidental Pervert was all over the place and felt very unbalanced. The childhood part seemed disproportionately long while the “serious” and “sad” parts of his adult life, like the death of his farther or marriage, seemed scrunched together.

There was a bright moment to my experience with this show though. There were some minor technical malfunctions with the lights and sound effects which caused, what seemed to be unscripted, jokes about how low-budget this production is and how badly this theater needs some cosmetic repair.  These moments were like a gasp of a fresh air and came as a relief to me. The hope was raised in me that Andrew Goffman is sane and maybe even not hopeless.

I want to think that he is just tired of being trapped in this set cluttered with Kleenex tissues, VCR tapes and other sentimental junk; tired of these old, not so funny jokes in a mediocre play. Well, I’m not sure if he is tired of it, but I sure was.