The narrator of Matt Smith‘s self-authored, one man show, All My Children, goes by the name Max Poth – an unassuming, if not altogether uninteresting handle to swing through life on. The dictionary gives a definition of pother as a verb meaning to harass and perplex. This little revelation gives you something of the low-key, thoughtful style of engagement Smith uses to come at a subject, and there’s much more of it in evidence in his writing and performance of this, really, quite twisted tale of a middle aged man, who fixates on the idea that there’s a slender chance – but not really – six of his past girlfriends may have borne his children in unions they made with subsequent partners. Six of them. But not really. This sets Poth off on the trail of the far-flung offspring, hardly hesitating to draw breath, before he arranges meetings with each in order to relay the, er, news.

We first meet Max at some sort of support group where he addresses us as his fellow attendees. He doesn’t reveal much about himself, and the focus of the group is sketchy – something to do with self-improvement – which is why his unselfconscious announcement of this fraudulent project is all the more perplexing; and/or breathtaking. Indeed he hardly skips a beat as he launches straight into how the first meeting with “his eldest”, Jennifer, went. Not well. Which perhaps spurs him on to the next. Such alarming egotism – and is it simply mischief making? – compels, and we are enrapt as, in rambling order, we are introduced to five additional unsuspecting strangers, while Max stretches himself to include everyone. It’s appalling and it’s funny, and that’s some clever cocktail to shake. Actually it’s more than clever. It’s brilliant.

Smith as a writer has a canny sense of how much information it takes to convince, and how much can be left out so that an audience will enter a tale. There’s a masterful game of hold or play going on. He’s sharp enough to throw out humdrum-seeming details that quietly glow – the sense of boundless enterprise a comfortable train ride can induce; what it might mean for someone to be in a kitchen “not cooking”; a faded My Little Pony tattoo. Shrewd enough too not to bother with the larger details, such as why? why? and why? You don’t have to have studied Advanced Narrative. Just don’t be stupid. Some areas are left pointedly grey, which is as it so often is with the texture of life.

Smith’s delivery partakes most naturally of the style of Max Poth, a digressive, elliptical narrator who will tell it as he sees fit – unabashedly, selfishly, cynically. He’s not interested in talking to anyone about their cancer- “I’m waiting for that conversation to end.” But he’s someone who notices things about people that others might not, and he acts – in his roundabout way – to help. He doesn’t explain this. It’s just evident in his story. Preposterous and wrong-headed, Max proves peculiarly winning when it comes to his capacity to stick with his highly individual “progeny”; like some sort of satellite dad with sub-particle sensitivity powers. He makes a virtue of mockery when he bribes one of his “daughters’ to give him an Eskimo nose rub in a diner, while intoning koobie-boobies. It’s plausible this icky baby talk acts as a sort of strange soul food for both parties. Max doesn’t say this, but odd things occur afterward.

Max doesn’t know what he wants from these exchanges. Perhaps his dry, detached style has shorn his life of melodrama, and he needs a fix. None of “his kids” prove particularly disposed toward that humor, so perhaps he has to up the ante a little. He doesn’t want to answer the phone to his “real family” – who are ringing all the time now, thank you! – but there may be a way. Something that involves a measure of bribery; an allusion to an inheritance; a conditional gathering. The imagined scenario proves thrilling not just for Max, but the audience, who at this point are putty in his hands. Who are all but convinced, it might, after all, not be such a bad thing for the other parties involved to drop along. Or at least, if Max Poth gets to tell the story. Or rather, Matt Smith. Directed by long time collaborator Bret Fetzer, this is sophisticated, sharp, and wise comedy, delivered by an actor at the top of his game. Miss it and you lose.

~~~

All My Children
Matt Smith
Writer: Matt Smith
Director: Bret Fetzer
Max Poth takes “what-might-have-been” to extremes. He tracks down the now-grown children of long-ago girlfriends, and tells them he’s their real father (knowing that he’s not). A strange lark takes on a life of its own.
1h 30m   National   Seattle, Washington
Comedy   Solo Show
Staycation: In Someone Else’s Shoes   Family Vacation
VENUE #09: The Gene Frankel Theatre
Tue 14 @ 3:45  Sun 19 @ 7:30  Thu 23 @ 8:30  Fri 24 @ 2:45  Sun 26 @ 12

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We all dream about making the world a better place.  Some people just can’t sit back and dream about it, however – some people have to take action, like the two brothers in A Dream About Sunflowers (written by Jonathan Wallace and directed by Amber Gallery) who start up “Geeks Without Borders” which (much like Doctors Without Borders) uses technology to assist people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe.

When we first meet Tom (Patrick Burchill) he’s in his forties but mentally seems much older; he’s thoroughly beaten down by what he sees going on in the world, day after day through his organization.  He dreams of packing it all in and living in a cabin, growing big sunflowers  . . . because he finds them fascinating.  ”Each floret forms at random angles to the others, and yet looked at as a whole they make a mathematically predictable pattern. Free will and fatality in a flower . . . It happens whether anybody is there or not, whether anybody understands or not.” Yet there’s no conceivable end date in sight for Tom.  His work has become his life and his life has become an endless stream of  people who he feels he must save.   He constantly ask the same questions – When can you say you’ve help enough people?  When can you feel that the good you are doing outweighs the mistake you made?

Tom is  telling this to Usha (Megha Nabe) – a woman who’s quick wit and fast smile isn’t slowed by the fact that she’s apparently lifeless from the waist down.  How she became a paraplegic becomes clearer as Tom spends his off-hours in a living room, winding back the clock and reliving the watershed moments of his life, such as the day he hired Usha to come work with him, and even further back to the day when Tom and his brother Jerry (Aaron Davis) were (like their namesakes) playing a cat and mouse game.  One brother (the slicker, younger Jerry) always coming out ahead, always having the answers, always in the right place at the right time.  And the older brother, Tom – a little more plodding, a little more thoughtful, a little more apt to stop and smell the sunflowers along the way and get tangled up in the miles of metaphorical computer cord.

Tom explains how Jerry came up with the concept of Geeks Without Borders and then acted as its front man because the project  ”was sexy—a geek in a flak jacket with a bulletproof laptop in his arms. If I was lucky, you’d see half my head, to one side of him in the photograph.”  When it comes to his younger brother, admiration and jealousy are so intertwined for Tom that it’s hard for him to articulate exactly how he felt about Jerry.  All that’s solidly clear is that each emotion is tethered to a lead balloon of guilt.

Just when you’re about to question why there’s so much exposition in Sunflowers (almost every conversation between Usha and Tom begins with a “tell me again about …”) an unexpected revaluation makes it all understandable and even forgivable.  And also very, very sad.

Some say that to dream of sunflowers symbolizes warmth, abundance, longevity, and prosperity.  If that is the case, then the title alludes to the use of the phase “to dream of” as in “to hope for” . . . Tom hopes for a life of abundance and longevity not just for himself (in fact, least of all for himself) but more so for the people who are in the Geeks Without Borders trenches, fighting for the disenfranchised and the displaced.  And of course, it is for those people above all whom Tom hopes for a life of warmth, abundance, longevity and prosperity.

Megha Nabe and Patrick Burchill do a great job of taking Jonathan Wallace’s script and making it a softer thing, a more layered and less black and white story. Nabe brings a charm and a goodness to the character of Usha: a woman who, otherwise, could easily have been portrayed as brittle and jaded.  Burchill, too, layers in complex emotions to Tom that don’t always add up to an easy way out.  He makes us feel the struggle Tom goes through every day to get up out of bed after lifting this enormous weight aside just to put his feet on the floor.  But at least he’s got another day in store.

There’s a hook at the end that makes a lot of some of the more questionable choices in Sunflowers easier to forgive, such as the bedtime story feel of it all.  Two adult people probably wouldn’t spend their waking hours reliving how they met – reminding each other with phrases such as “then you  . . .” “Yes, and I . . .”.  It’s a little stilted and awkward, but the big reveal explains much of the mechanism away, and therefore gives the entire play the feeling of a fairy tale – one which Tom must repeat to himself over and over again until his time has been served and he can go be more of the “free will” part of the sunflower and less the “fatality”.  The sad thing is, he knows . . .he will continue this ritual whether anybody is there or not, whether anybody understands or not.

~~~

Related Posts:

• All My Children (Fringe Festival 2012)
• A Brief History Of Thyme (2012 Planet Connections Festivity)
• Entrevista: The Starship Astrov and Asian Belle (Midtown International Theatre Festival 2010)
• Clandestine: It’s A Secret {But Tell Your Friends} . . . (Planet Connections 2010)