> Colin Thomas
When you unwrap Self-ish, there’s a gift waiting for you, but you’ve got to paw your way through a lot of packing material to get to it.
In this monologue, playwright Kuan Foo introduces us to a 35-year-old Korean-Canadian woman named Esther. She’s buttoned-down—“We are not a huggy family”—but bursting with feeling.
The script takes too long to find its subject, which is Esther’s grief over the death of her father. And, even when the play taps into that material, it keeps going off on tangents—about Esther’s too-cartoonish, praying mantis-like boss, for instance. Dawn Millman’s direction adds to the distraction: some of the things she has performer Diana Bang do with packing boxes are clever, but there’s far too much manipulation of these props.
Still, the heart of the show is a killer—thanks largely to Bang’s witty and transparent performance. Emotions pass over her like weather. She’s a star.
Remaining performances at the Revue Stage on September 12 (10:15 p.m.), 14 (8:30 p.m.), and 15 (2:15 p.m.)
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