★★★★★
In an intimate, 150-seat black-box theater, one man bleeds out in a performance to confront your loneliness.
“You’ve tried everything,” reads the synopsis of Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight. “Yoga. Acupuncture. Therapy. You floated in salt water in the pitch black dark. You juiced, you cleansed, you journaled, you cut, you volunteered. You ate only RINDS for three days and nights. You reached out, you looked within. You have tried. And yet here you are.”
Playing at the Huntington Theatre through March 23, Stand Up is a 60-minute, strikingly interactive, (mostly) one-man tour de force, aiming to explain, answer, or fix the loneliness of its audience by curtain call.
Jim Ortlieb—a seasoned Broadway, film, and TV veteran—sits in the saddle of Stand Up, carrying his performance as the nameless “Man” with precision and the kind of charisma that puts people in office.
The stage, level with the audience, is an ornate disarray of decorative fixtures—several picture frames, four chandeliers, two ladders, and a rolling laundry hamper, to name a few. Ortlieb commands it with the power of a 20-man ensemble.
There’s really no breaking of the fourth wall in Stand Up—it’s clearly and intentionally absent from the get-go. Ortlieb opens the show with a warm welcome to the audience. The following 60 minutes, he explains, will be an attempt to connect with them, to foster something instinctively affectionate, and to transcend their mutual crisis of loneliness.
This relationship is forged through a vibrant dialogue. Audience members are, at random, pointed at, directed, and called on to speak. On a number of occasions, Ortlieb commands, “Stand up if you’re here tonight.”
These interactions are mostly awkward, but they’re spliced with frames of something tender, nostalgic, and incredibly human. If nothing else, it’s a surefire way to root a relationship.
For a show so wrapped up in the concept of loneliness, Ortlieb manages to deliver more hearty laughs than solemn tears. The audience erupts almost once a minute as he chops up his anthropological monologues with rapid-fire, sarcastic quips.
“Some people will say, ‘What’s the point of shining a flickering light on a pitch-black world?’” Ortlieb says, before pausing and deadpanning to the audience. “F—k those people.”
The man next to me clutches his gut in a violent belly laugh.
It’s through humor that Stand Up distinguishes itself. The writer and director, John Kolvenbach, isn’t afraid to poke fun at his own project or concede to its cliches.
Amid a world of frequently insufferable, pandemic-reflective art, Stand Up is refreshing in its reluctance to coddle the audience. It’s deep-cutting, but not melodramatic, and thoughtful, but not precious—a rare balance.
Still, in a room full of people who have flipped through every self-help book, dabbled in every wellness trend, and flirted with every spiritual persuasion to fill the godly void within them, Stand Up is bold for claiming to offer a solution.
After all, is it not equally as desperate to try and fill such a void with a piece of live art? Is it not just as hopeless to trudge to a theater, twiddle your thumbs as you wait for the lights to dim, and pray that the latest, bravest, think piece of a play simmers you down to your lowest boiling point?
Stand Up walks a narrow line of being the exact thing it scoffs at.
Yet, as a blackout swallows up the final scene, you might find yourself somehow moored to the past 60 minutes. You might find a shimmer of something to take home—something to believe in.
Maybe it won’t be the void-filling, religion of an experience you thought you needed. But it might be something. Give it a chance.
