Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: Born Today- Comedian Pee Wee Herman- The New Yorker

Pee-wee is a round-shouldered, knock-kneed picture of arrested development.CREDITILLUSTRATION BY PABLO LOBATO

“Turn again, turn again, turn once again,” Tennessee Williams wrote in “Carousel Tune.” “The freaks of the cosmic circus are men. / We are the gooks and the geeks of creation; / Believe-It-or-Not is the name of our star.” Enter Pee-wee Herman (a.k.a. Paul Reubens), a man high on the freaks’ roll call, who has now transported his geekiness and the Oddball Free Zone of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” his cult kids’ TV show (1986-91), to Broadway as “The Pee-wee Herman Show” (at the Stephen Sondheim, directed by Alex Timbers). Pee-wee is a character so vivid in the popular imagination that he has superseded his creator. It’s Pee-wee who has his name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and Pee-wee who claims to be an honorary Muppet and marine. Nonetheless, it’s Reubens, not his nerdy alter ego, who is living by the credo “No guts, no glory.” Some comedians stay funny; some lose funny; some, like Reubens, whose comic dynasty collapsed in 1991, after a public embarrassment in an adult-movie theatre, have funny taken away from them. For almost two decades, the much loved character actor continued to make a living in movies, but he sidelined his platitudinous pinhead. Bringing Pee-wee back is an act of courage in defiance of the media’s puritanical twittering; it is also a great relief to his legion of fans, who, on the night I saw the show, were whooping it up long before Pee-wee skittered onstage like a bow-tied water bug, his face clenched in its familiar rictus of surprise and delight.

Pee-wee Herman was born in Los Angeles in 1977, at the Groundlings, a well-known improvisational-comedy club. “I decided to be . . . this guy who was never gonna make it as a comic,” Reubens explained in 2004. “And part of it was because I couldn’t remember jokes in real life. I couldn’t remember the punchline.” Taking his first name from a brand of mini-harmonicas, and coming onstage with a bag full of toys, Pee-wee was a faux-naïf collection of infantile attitudes which immediately struck a chord. Now, as then, Pee-wee is a round-shouldered, knock-kneed picture of arrested development. His voice is high and strangulated, his laugh shrill and affectless, a sound that comes from the throat, not the belly. He occasionally lets out a scream of fear or a wail of loathing; when he throws himself on the floor in a tantrum, he adopts a kind of fetal position. Although Reubens is nearly sixty, Pee-wee seems untouched by adulthood. He is preternaturally thin; his face is pink, smooth, and unlined. He is ungainly. His gray suit is too tight and his sleeves too short, emphasizing his long floppy wrists; his pants are short, too, exposing his white socks and gauche white tasselled loafers. He is a literal, as well as spiritual, misfit.

Pee-wee’s trick is to slyly mock childhood and manhood. By instinct and archetype, comedy is usually phallic: Chaplin has his cane, Harpo his horn, Groucho his cigar, and Dame Edna her gladioli, with which to poke, probe, and goose the world. Pee-wee, by contrast, is the comedian of non-phallic fun. (As if to underscore this fact, he wears an abstinence ring.) He exhibits a startling fear of flesh: he won’t shake hands with Cowboy Curtis (Phil LaMarr) unless his hands are washed; he won’t kiss Miss Yvonne (Lynne Marie Stewart), who explains that her nice smell is due to “toilet water.” “I’m wearing a light toilet water, too, but it was an accident,” Pee-wee says. Miss Yvonne has eyes for Cowboy Curtis, but Pee-wee is disgusted by the idea of a physical relationship. “I’m glad I don’t have to worry about love and all that creepy junk,” he says. His real romantic attachment is to Chairry, a sky-blue armchair with big eyelashes, arms that hold him, and a pink mouth full of white teeth beneath her seat. “I love when you sit on me,” Chairry says. “I love sitting on you, Chairry,” Pee-wee replies, in what passes here for foreplay. When—during a power outage that turns the whole stage black—sex rears its ugly head, all the inanimate objects get jiggy; Pee-wee, however, gets lost in the quest for a flashlight.

Since Pee-wee is devoid of sexuality, his world is inevitably absent of curiosity, if not wonder. Everything on David Korins’s impish set—map, globe, window, flower box, screen, chair—moves and talks, but this cocoon of visual excitement lacks any sense of a world beyond its Easter-egg-colored boundaries. In his vacuum-sealed playpen, Pee-wee disarms with his enthusiasm and his emptiness. “Good morning, boys and girls!” he says at the beginning of the show, before getting us to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He lets us in on the secret word, which is “fun,” and asks us to shout each time we hear it. In less than a minute, we have fallen through the rabbit hole and into Pee-wee’s universe of giggles. There’s the Giant Foil Ball; there are soup-can telephones; there’s a reading from “Part-Time Dog” (“ ‘Brownie had no place to go. He sniffed for a bone in a garbage can,’ ” Pee-wee recites, breaking down in sobs). When Chairry confesses to loving the author of the book, Jane Thayer, Pee-wee snaps back, “Then why don’t you marry her? Oh, sorry, you can’t, cuz you’re both girls.” Conky, the robot, pipes up: “They could in Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, Washington, D.C., and Iowa.”

The kids don’t get this, of course, but, for the adult members of the audience, it’s the one and only solid joke in an evening that is otherwise the comic equivalent of lint. After twenty minutes of non-characters wandering in a non-plot, speaking non-dialogue, driven by a comedian who is distinguished by his artificial non-personality, a sense of doom sets in. It’s like being trapped in a fun house or tickled to death. Pee-wee is not supposed to do anything well; the surprise is how little he does at all. He chops an onion; he dances with Chairry; he puts on a vibrating belt. There is no poetry in his fuss—just postures of repression. In this show, Pee-wee gets his wish to fly like Pterri the Pterodactyl, a green puppet who swoops around from time to time. But when Pee-wee is airborne, typically, he gets there by a puppetry sleight of hand, rather than by real physical daring. “Good night!” he shouts, flying away. “Have fun.” It’s the secret word, of course, but, though I wish Pee-wee all the luck in the world, his secret is safe with me.

Pee-wee lives outside history, in the solitude of his own TV-addled bubblehead. The Joseph family, in Amy Herzog’s smart, finely written “After the Revolution” (well directed by Carolyn Cantor, at Playwrights Horizons), are Marxists who live to change history, and whose lives are changed by it. At issue is the legend of the family patriarch, Joe, a Communist activist in the nineteen-thirties, who was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Joe, who became a Washington economist and is not long dead, is idealized by his descendants; a liberal fund for social justice run by his eloquent granddaughter, Emma (Katharine Powell), is named for him. The news that a forthcoming book outs Joe as a Russian spy threatens to turn both his legacy and his tight-knit family upside down.

“After the Revolution” is a shrewd, ironic meditation on what we do with history, how we appropriate it for our own psychological needs. Among the play’s many pleasures—a firm grasp of historical paradox, sharp dialogue—the most satisfying is the way the characters struggle through their differences to listen to one another. The ability to listen is, perhaps, the definition of love. Herzog’s accomplishment is to trap this rare sense of connection. She is aided by a number of old pros, among them the droll David Margulies, as a lefty benefactor of the fund; the expert Peter Friedman, who plays Emma’s embattled father, Ben; and the clever Lois Smith, as Joe’s widow, Vera, to whom Herzog gives many of the play’s acid thoughts. “The fact is you weren’t there back then, so you can’t ever really know what it was like,” she tells Emma, who is about to publicly denounce her late grandfather’s actions. “You can look back and say we did this wrong, or we did that wrong, the point is it was for something,” Vera says, adding, “I look at most people your age . . . and I don’t know what they’re for.” I’ll drink to that. ♦