By Andrew Poretz . . . .
“A playwright confuses her opening night and is faced with an audience expecting to be entertained. As she pulls ideas out of her ass, an array of compelling characters come to life.” That’s the elevator-pitch premise of Water, Kacie Devaney’s solo show at the United Solo Theatre Festival at Theatre Row on November 9.
The festival, the world’s largest solo festival, showcases a diverse range of short, one-person shows, from storytelling and comedy to dance and musical performances, and runs annually in the fall and spring seasons. Devaney is a talented multi-hyphenate performer and playwright, and is now also a singer/songwriter.
At the opening, Devaney’s character, Water, discovers she has somehow shown up on stage a year early for her show, and must come up with just the right premise for her show relating to the 1920s, stunned to discover an audience waiting for the show to start. After dancing to “The Charleston,” she declared, “I don’t want this play to be about flappers! Been there, done that…”, but decides to stick with the Roaring 20’s era. The character essentially “workshops” her one-woman show in real time, trying out various premises and character ideas. (To be clear, this is in fact the show as scripted.) Along the way, she takes on various characters, including Winston Churchill, Churchill’s daughter Diana, gangsters, women bootleggers at a speakeasy, a woman risking her life with the French resistance to distribute false identification cards, a blind musician, and more, utilizing clever changes in wardrobe and props, as well as accents and dialects. She interspersed these with parts of recordings of songs such as “Too Sexy For My Shirt,” and more. There was a ballet segment set to recorded music, and Devaney also performed a pair of original songs: “Rise,” written about living through the Covid pandemic (performed after she became Diana Churchill, who survived the Spanish Flu of 1918), and later, the powerful “Vel’ d’Hiv’,” about her French resistance character, based on te true story of a mass arrest and genocide of Parisian Jews in 1942. (In October, Devaney performed her songs at Shrine World Music Venue in Harlem.)
The characters, for the most part, are broadly drawn and easily recognizable from tropes and props like Churchill’s cigar and the ever-present French cigarette. “Water” is used both the character’s name and a metaphor, and the word worked its way into much of the script.
With Billie Holiday singing “I’ll Be Seeing You” as Devaney wrapped up, Water ended with an invitation to “meet me next week, same time, same place,” for the “finished” show, reminiscent of that sign you might have seen in pubs, “Free Beer Tomorrow!”
The piece was an intriguing work in progress, if challenging to follow. Devaney packed a lot into roughly 48 minutes. It will be interesting to revisit this when presented in a longer form, more fleshed out, with the characters less broadly drawn.
Water was directed by Devaney’s mother, Karen Devaney of Soapbox Stageworks in Carmel, California. Learn more about Kacie Devaney at https://www.kaciekreation.com. For more information about the festival, visit https://unitedsolo.org.
