Theatre Journal

If a tear is, as William Archer wrote in his 1888 treatise against Diderot, the “external, visible, sensible fact” of the “most important emotion” for an actor, then one can understand how an actor’s failure to produce this sign of effective performance could be devastating. In comedian Kate Berlant’s spiraling meta-performance Kate, the titular character’s inability to cry on cue is itself the traumatic foundation upon which a self is constructed. Berlant’s star is on the rise. Her standup special Cinnamon in the Wind premiered on Hulu two weeks before I caught Kate; both performances were directed by the equally multi-faceted Bo Burnham. Berlant’s brand of experimental comedy shows a sophistication that resonates with the ironic simulations of the downtown New York performance scene while also evincing a genuine love for live theatre.

The lobby of the Connelly Theater was crammed full of all things “Kate”: her name and photos hung on the walls, her black jeans and top displayed in vitrines, her Moleskine notebook elevated on a plinth. Two immersive “experiences” flanked the lobby, inviting the audience to relive the performer’s past: the first, a stretch of sand, recalling her youth on the beaches of Santa Monica; the second, a recreation of her childhood living room, her father’s ersatz lounge chair center. An artist’s statement just this side of pretension proclaimed: “The theatre requires a sacred corporal exchange […] As I enter this space, I am destroyed and transformed, made consumable only as I become consumed by my own narrative.” And there, on a bench to one side, sat the woman herself, in dark sunglasses, scrolling through her phone, wearing a sign that said: “Ignore me.”

If the lobby display sent up the narcissism sanctified by both celebrity and museum culture, the performance parodied the genre of the autobiographical monologue. Shifting between direct address and her over-the-top characterizations (including her impersonation of an old stagehand who bookended the show with claptrap about the magic of the stage), Berlant put her own spin on the familiar story of the small-town girl, sitting on her porch under the stars and dreaming of making it big in Hollywood. Stymied by a mother who insists that her “big, crass style of indication has no place on camera,” Kate travels to New York and takes to the stage instead, which she hopes will be more forgiving. Retreading the narrative arc of many such shows, she must overcome a secret trauma to achieve success. But here, the oft-mentioned traumatic memory was peeled back layer-by-layer like an onion without ever revealing a core; instead, Kate arrived at an event that—also onion-like—prompted tears using more mechanical means.

Each of these reveals had the outward shape of a genuine experience of trauma. For example, when her mother discovered a young Kate playing with her father’s camera, Berlant mimed her raising her fist overhead, threatening violent abuse—not on the child, but on the beloved camcorder. Later, an older man invites the innocent girl from the country back to his apartment and, seemingly intent on seduction, lures her not to his bedroom, but in front of a camera, where he entices her to act out different emotions in closeup. If her mother had established the filmic as taboo, this was the forbidden fruit—made present in the theatre by the camera on a tripod that watched Berlant from the edge of the stage throughout her performance.

The real trauma, if one could call it such, ended up being a matter of technique. Called upon to cry for her first onscreen audition, Kate stalled out. We watched it all live and doubled on the big projection screen looming behind the performer. Everything was going well in the audition scene, the actress restrained in the intimate world of the filmic. But when the script asked for the character to weep, [End Page 576] Berlant’s face decomposed into...