[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thanks for sharing part of your day with us. The protagonist of Liz Kingman's comedy show is messy, or at least she wants you to believe She's messy because messy is interesting, intriguing. A girl who's messy is worthy of a One Woman Show, right? That's the premise of Liz Kingman's new meta performance now at Greenwich House poking fun at the rash of one-woman shows about quirky, troubled, yet relatable anti-heroines. Her show is called One Woman Show. It's really a show within a show.

There's a fictional version of Liz as an aspiring artist desperate to nail a recording of her one-woman show Wildfowl about an occasionally drunk, little bit horny, self-serious woman who works for a bird trust. Hoping that some TV exec will discover her, she's recording her act full of over-the-top monologues and memory flashbacks, but things keep going wrong with the tech deeply annoying the fictional and professionally thirsty Liz, but it won't stop her from telling this story of a messy woman in her late 20s trying and failing to get her life together.

One Woman Show took London by storm, ending up on the West End and earning rider and performer Liz Kingsman an Olivier Award nomination. It is now playing here at the Greenwich House Theater through August 11th. I tried to give you the award, Liz.

Liz Kingman: Yes, I liked that actually.

Alison Stewart: Okay, good.

Liz Kingman: That's how awards work, right? [laughter] You can get them on the radio a little bit later.

Alison Stewart: When did you first have this idea? I know that's the 101 question, but when did you first have this idea?

Liz Kingman: It would be so much more convenient for this if it was like a bolt out of the blue moment and it was all just there on my brain suddenly, but it was a very slow burning feeling of like something happening on stage in London. There was just this moment, this cultural moment, 2018/2019 where that you just couldn't move for one-woman shows, there were just so many of them. I spent a lot of time in comedy festivals, so you see a lot of posters that look quite similar or you read lots of blurbs and things.

It came about just because I kept noticing the same sorts of words coming up again and again to describe these stories, like raw and honest and unflinching [laughter] and I just thought that was funny.

Alison Stewart: The U-word, unflinching.

Liz Kingman: Unflinching, exactly.

Alison Stewart: I read you had a wall of Post-Its and if you saw something come up in three different one-woman shows it got a Post-It note.

Liz Kingman: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What's an example?

Liz Kingman: There's always a scene where the character loses themself in a club, when they've hit rock bottom and they feel like there's nothing, there's nowhere else they can possibly go but the club. They go, but in these versions, the writer-performers of these players often use it as an excuse to get a little bit of sexy dance number in. [laughter] I found that interesting that the idea that a particular version of hitting rock bottom was also visually arresting and appealing to the male gaze. It happens in films as well.

Those scenes in films where women go to the club by themselves and they lose themselves to the music. There's something sexualized about that free fall that I found quite funny and also funny to do on stage when you're not in a club.

Alison Stewart: Yes, you get to do that on stage in the club. Actually, you know what? The lighting is fantastic in this show.

Liz Kingman: Oh, I agree. Thank you. It's incredible. A lighting designer called Daniel Carter-Brennan, who's been on this journey with me in the show since the very beginning. We actually came up with an alter ego for him so that, because it's a show within a show, if Dan ever tried to light something too well, we'd say, so his alter ego was called Diablo, which is also the name of a lighting fixture, so we'd say, "That looks really good, Dan, but what would Diablo do?" It would be like it'd encourage him to make it basically worse.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Or just overly dramatic.

Liz Kingman: Exactly, a little bit too much.

Alison Stewart: Even the way that the chair is in the center of the stage that your Liz, the character comes in. It reminded me of the Fatal Attraction chair a little bit.

Liz Kingman: I've actually never seen it. It's that film that's like it comes out all the time and I've never seen it. Maybe I have to do that today.

Alison Stewart: It's part of your homework.

Liz Kingman: Yes.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Liz Kingman, she's the writer and star of One Woman Show. It's running at Greenwich House Theater through August 11th. Why do you think this messy female protagonist archetype has become so popular recently?

Liz Kingman: I think that it wasn't a version of womanhood that was particularly afforded to us in storytelling in the past. It was lots of perfect wives. I think there was just a version of the female experience who was quite sanitized. Then there was this wave of people who were pushing back against that and everyone is always creating their work in reaction to something even if you think you're not, you are always reacting to something. I think that people were reacting to that version of him being like, "I'm not perfect, I'm flawed." Trying to put more authentic female stories on screen and on stage.

Then I think maybe what happened is a few of them became very commercially successful, so it starts to become a path for getting stuff green-lit. Those things start to become patterns, and then the patterns become expectations. That's just art really, isn't it? Things move in trends and waves. I think that's maybe what happened, but yes, that would be me with my academic hat on it.

Alison Stewart: It becomes commerce, get me the one messy one-woman show.

Liz Kingman: Yes. It's selling well and there's an audience for it. I think for writer-performers, they're fun to play because we do spend a lot of our life repressing all the things that we would like to say or the things that we'd like to do and the things we'd like to eat or drink or all those sorts of vices essentially. We do a good job usually at keeping our vices in check, whereas those characters don't, and so that's fun for actors. I think that's appealing for actors to be like, "Oh, I'd get to hit rock bottom in a club." That'd be a fun day on set. I think that's maybe why it happened, but yes, it's fun, I suppose.

Alison Stewart: The show has so many meta layers because when you first go in, and it took me a minute to figure it out, I felt silly afterward,-

Liz Kingman: Good.

Alison Stewart: -but there are all these signs that say, "This is being recorded. Wildfowl's being recorded for purposes." It really hit you the minute you hit the door of the theater. How did you decide you wanted to start that way in the lobby before we even get to the audience?

Liz Kingman: It's been a big discussion because, from a marketing point of view, it's quite confusing because the show within the show is called Wildfowl, and if we have Wildfowl merch and we have Wildfowl signage, and in this day and age, everyone relies on social media and people posting about what they've come to see, then we've got people posting that they've come to see Wildfowl and people can Google that and there's no such play on in New York right now. In my own way, I'm my own marketing team's worst nightmare. We always had this idea that it was like, once you go into the theater, you're entering a magic portal. You are actually at a performance of Wildfowl. That was the logic behind it.

Alison Stewart: Then the show starts and we are not really sure-

Liz Kingman: Yes, it's confusing.

Alison Stewart: -if it's starting or if it's not starting.

Liz Kingman: Tell you what's fun about that is really putting the audience in a weird head space and hoping they'll laugh.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Have you had a long span of people being like, "Wait, is this starting?"

Liz Kingman: Yes, definitely. There's little canary moments for me where I know if they've got it or not. I have to say in America, I've found those moments are coming later and I think that is because, and again, I'm generalizing here, but I think there's just a more of a tendency in America to be quite earnest and be like, "Great, if you're telling me it's being filmed, then I will accept that it's being filmed." Whereas British audiences are very cynical and they're like, "No, we don't believe you." It's been an interesting translation.

Alison Stewart: There's at one point, the boss, the protagonist boss, Dana says to Liz, our play Liz, "You're not a mess, you just want to be seen as one."

Liz Kingman: Yes, it's quite a low blow.

Alison Stewart: Is she right? Is Dana right?

Liz Kingman: About that character, I think yes. I think that character's doing fine. She's got a job and she's got shelter, she's got a job, she's got friends, she's got a romantic life, she should be fulfilled. I guess the low blow of that moment is like, "Why are you making your life appear so chaotic," but it's trendy, isn't it? I know Twitter is perhaps a bit of a dying platform, but I feel like in the heyday, it was all about people doing a tweet that was extremely relatable.

Something that they'd done that felt quite confessional like instead of experiencing humiliation in the wild, you'd just tweet about your humiliation and then you'd get some validation for it, and people would be like, "I did that as well." Whereas I'm very private, so if I do something I'm not proud of, I'd bury it. [laughter] No one's to know.

Alison Stewart: To your point about being cynical, cynical can be funny though sometimes.

Liz Kingman: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: There is a big laugh when it said, "They haven't decided which woman will be successful this year," you say.

Liz Kingsman: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What is the commentary you wanted to make about the space women get to hold?

Liz Kingsman: I can give an example from my own life,-

Alison Stewart: Oh, yes.

Liz Kingsman: -which perhaps is going to make me sound extremely arrogant, but I suppose that's fine because I'm on the radio, I don't know. How does it look? One of the headlines that come with coverage of my show has been the new queen of comedy which I just find is a very bizarre tone of phrase because it implies that I'm being coronated. No, wait, is that what I mean? [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Liz Kingsman: You think I'd know because we just had one. It implies that you'll reign for a short time and then somebody else will reign for a while.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Liz Kingsman: You'll have your moment, and then we'll decide which woman comes next. I just had the sense in the last few years that that is the nature of the spotlight, is that people can't move in and out of it. I don't know, it just felt more extreme with women, but it was like you put a lot of praise on one person and what they make, and then you move on to the next person and what they make. I didn't know if that line is in the show because it always resonates, people laugh at it, so I was like, "All right, I'm keeping it then." I think that was where it came from.

Alison Stewart: It's the accent through them.

Liz Kingsman: [chuckles] Yes, exactly.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] For anybody who watched Fleabag, that's obviously one of the references, even the outfit that you wear on stage.

Liz Kingsman: Actually, the outfit predates that.

Alison Stewart: That's amazing.

Liz Kingsman: The show, a lot of people think it's like a particular reference to one scene in the second season of that show, but it's not. It's just when you do an hour and 10-minute long show, it's quite a sweaty experience sometimes, so I was like, "I can't really wear color, I guess I'll have to wear black and white." I was like, "Oh, maybe stripes will make it a bit more interesting." The overalls, you call them overalls here.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Liz Kingsman: Or dungarees, we call them, are like an absolute staple of fringe theatre in the UK anyway.

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Liz Kingsman: If you go to Brighton or Edinburgh festivals, it's just a sea of women wearing dungarees. One of the first things I wrote into the script was that she was wearing dungarees. It's one of those things where I think people think it's a reference, but it's not.

Alison Stewart: Maybe to your point, it's a reference that Fleabag made.

Liz Kingsman: Exactly, it's a reference that people--

Alison Stewart: It's an archetype, I guess.

Liz Kingsman: Yes. They're like, "Oh, it must be that."

Alison Stewart: There's Wildfowl. We discussed this and there's One Woman Show, your show, and then Wildfowl, the show within the show. How did you come upon a bird trust?

Liz Kingsman: I was writing the show in Cork in Ireland in a hotel room that was looking out across the river, and I had two weeks left before I had to perform it. I'd booked in one night at a theatre at a festival in London called the Camden Comedy Festival and I hadn't written any of it and it was two weeks away. I had a lot of Post-It notes as discussed, but none of it had actually made into anything that I could stand on stage and do in front of people. The view was just looking out over this river with these birds that stood there all day to the point where they were completely still.

I thought they were like statues, but then they'd move. I guess birds were just on my mind, so I started writing. I started looking up different birds and I found this bird called the black-tailed godwit, who is a real bird and it really does the plot of the show with this bird, which I won't give away any spoilers. Basically, this is a real charity, the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust. I wrote it into the show, the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, the character works for the marketing department of their charity. I thought 50 people were going to see this thing. I didn't expect it to have the life it's had. When we got-

Alison Stewart: That's funny.

Liz Kingsman: -a nice review in The Guardian which is a very big newspaper, of course, in the UK, the real Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust got in contact to say, "We're so confused. We've seen this review that says your character works for our charity." They wanted to come and see it. We were at the point where we didn't have a single ticket left, where we'd sold all of our comps. We didn't actually physically have a ticket we could give them, but we had another run planned for the January in a couple of months' time so we invited them to that one.

I think they might have come and seen it then. Then once we got to the West End run, I was able to reach out to them and say, "Look, I've done this for too long now let's work together." We got some editorial from them and put it in the program and they were involved in the signage for the venue and stuff. It was really great. It's a genuinely real charity. It protects the wetland habitats for birds and wildlife.

Alison Stewart: That's a good thing.

Liz Kingsman: It's good. It's a very good thing.

Alison Stewart: If you can take yourself out of it, do you have a sense of why the show has caught on?

Liz Kingsman: It's definitely been a big surprise to me. Every step of the way I'm always surprised by it. From what I can gather, I think I might have struck upon something that people were thinking but hadn't maybe articulated yet. Actually, that's maybe not the whole answer. I think there's that side of it, which is maybe a bit more highbrow, intellectualized talk around the themes of the show.

I think what happened is when people told their friends to come and see it, they'd say it was about this or it's about commercialization of feminism or it's about marketplace feminism, these sorts of themes that sounded very serious. Then when their friends would come and see it, it's actually very silly and it's very stupid. That is high praise, of course.

Alison Stewart: Goofy in the best way.

Liz Kingsman: Goofy, why not use goofy? It's light-hearted and it's genuinely just comedy. I'm trying to make people laugh. That's my aim. I think that side of the show surprised people. They went in thinking they were going to have to put their reading glasses on, and then they came out being like, "Oh, I've had a nice time." It was like a reverse Trojan horse. I think a lot of the times things are advertised as being very fun and silly, and then they've got a message. Whereas mine was advertised weirdly as having a message, and then the silliness was the bonus.

Alison Stewart: You get both.

Liz Kingsman: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: It's a twofer.

Liz Kingsman: It's like a topping on an ice cream. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] Liz Kingsman's show is called One Woman Show. It's running at the Greenwich House Theater until August 11th. Liz, thanks for coming to the studio.

Liz Kingsman: Thank you so much for having me.

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.