Staff Picks: Metaphors, Messengers, and Melancholy
Jacqueline Novak. Photo: Monique Carboni.
Everything about the comedian Jacqueline Novak’s Off-Broadway stand-up show—recently extended through October 6—is clever, beginning with the title: . Before the curtain rises in the West Village playhouse, there is the theater within the theater of the audience—on a recent visit, amid the sea of bespectacled, fashionable young women, a famous British television host and an actress from the HBO series were in attendance. As the lights go down, it is impossible not to feel a pang of anxiety for Novak, who has promised to entertain this crowd for seventy-five minutes, alone, on a barren gray stage. But she breaks the ice quickly, comparing the moment of approaching the microphone to the palpitating anxiety of moving, and encourages the audience to whisper the word to themselves. Doggy style, she tells us, should be given a more dignified name: “I prefer to call it the Hound’s Way.” The show is structured around anticipation, the erotic tension of will-she-or-won’t-she, and the ending, an explosion of poetic mania that expands into the profoundly philosophical, is worthy of her buildup. In a moment when the boundaries between high and low culture have all but dissolved, Novak has found one of the few remaining tensions to play with.
