Word: monologuists
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Eric Bogosian, a monologuist, is at the American Repertory Theatre (ART) this weekend with a work in progress entitled Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll. Dressed in black, he relies on stories and characters instead of special effects or gimmicks to create his version of theater...
Iacocca claims that before he took Dale Carnegie courses at age 25, he was a terrible speechmaker. Nowadays in public, and often in private, he seems more a crackling stand-up monologuist than a sober corporate spokesman, a sort of Rodney Dangerfield who gets all the respect in the world, or George C. Scott's Patton turned happy and unthreatening. "I gotta tell ya," Iacocca told a wined-and-dined gathering of stock-market analysts in Detroit earlier this month, "with our $2.4 billion in profits last year, they gave me a great big bonus. Really, it's almost obscene...
...Shapiro is afflicted with a temperament suited less to a religious zealot than to a retrograde cab driver. In Jerusalem, the bitter, aging monologuist recalls his days in America. There, "as in Sodom, the perpetrator went free and the witness rotted in jail. And all this was done in the name of liberalism." Argues Shapiro: "When a man sleeps with a modern woman, he actually gets into bed with all her lovers. That's why there are so many homosexuals today...
Last year Jane Martin (a pen name shielding a woman who refuses to reveal her identity) made her unforgettable debut as a monologuist with Twirlers, in which the heroine likens champion baton wielding to a transcendent experience ("Twirling is the throwing of yourself up to God"). Lisa Goodman repeats her role this year, and ten more Martin monologues have been added. The most powerful, in content and performance, is Handler. The heroine (Susan Cash) belongs to the Holiness Church and handles rattlers: "If you got the spirit, snake don't bite...
Popularity is one measure of a performer's achievement, but in this case it is the least compelling. Pryor is not a flash, a freak, even a one-man trend; he is the soaring demon angel of movies, concerts and Grammy-winning albums. As a comedy monologuist, Pryor is without peer. Drawing his material from the black hole of ghetto life and death, Pryor uses his dramatic power to magnetize his listeners into the fire-flash fear of the moment-even as his skewed comic perspective offers distance, safety, reassurance. As a straight actor, he has the uncanny knack...