Review: One Woman Show Pokes Fun at the Star-Vehicle Solo Play

If you’ve ever spent any time around the theater, you’ll recognize the form: a confessional solo show from an actor fresh out of drama school, hoping to be discovered in the meat market of a fringe festival (RIP FringeNYC). Liz Kingsman’s One Woman Show seems to be exactly that, but processed through ChatGPT a few times with a directive to make the text more marketable. The result is a 70-minute send-up of our cynical age of professional theater, in which every career choice is a step toward Netflix, buoyed by a dream of never having to appear live onstage again.

After playing acclaimed runs in London, Sydney, and (yes) the Edinburgh Fringe, One Woman Show has now landed off-Broadway at the Greenwich House Theater, where it has audiences heaving with laughter.

The show-within-the-show is called Wildfowl: “Hopefully a major TV series,” a caffeinated text bubble says on the show poster. At the top, Kingsman (or is it?) announces that this evening’s performance will be recorded, but that we should ignore the two cameras positioned on either side of the stage because, “the show is for you guys.”

Wildfowl is about an unnamed protagonist who works at a bird conservation charity. Fast approaching 30 and still living with her best friend from university, she’s not sure how to find a way forward in her life — but she knows it involves a lot of raunchy sex with strange men. As this story unfolds, backstage drama seeps into the spotlight in the form of technical difficulties and thwarted ambition, and our actor does all she can to contain her rage. It’s Fleabag meets The Play That Goes Wrong.

Kingsman is a gifted comedian gleefully stomping in a puddle of muddy clichés. From tortured avian metaphors to a tawdry office affair, it all seems drawn from the same polluted well of 21^st century urban mythology — but Kingsman brilliantly subverts our expectations with ridiculous, improbable, laugh-out-loud plot twists. Her ultra-dry delivery is only occasionally interrupted by a little chuckle or a knowing glance, her mouth agape as if to say, I know…I’m so naughty and outrageous.

She is in the odd position of mocking actors who use tour-de-force solo performances to boost their careers by…giving a tour-de-force solo performance that has absolutely boosted her career. Kingman realizes this contradiction and embraces it, which is part of the fun.

The late Adam Brace smartly directed One Woman Show to spotlight the talents of the performer while exploding as many hoary tropes as possible: The set is a swivel chair with moss inexplicably growing on the legs. Set and costume designer Chloe Lamford outfits Kingsman in overalls and a horizontal striped shirt, the sexy toddler aesthetic favored by so many twentysomethings. Daniel Carter-Brennan’s lighting does extra work as our protagonist hits the town to hit rock bottom. And sound designer Max Perryment assaults our ears with bird noises, to boldly underline the aforementioned avian motif. It’s all so bad and so hilarious.

One Woman Show will most appeal to theater regulars who have been around long enough to see a few of these dreadful solo plays. But the phenomena that Kingsman sends up (thinly veiled ambition, false sincerity, hand-wringing around manners and style in a culture that has us all running on a treadmill toward the next thing) will be familiar to anyone who lives on Earth — except maybe the protagonist of Wildfowl. I’m pretty sure she’s an extraterrestrial posing undercover as a messy British millennial.