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Much of what makes us laugh in comedy arises out of pain. And Dale Stewart’s subversive, poignant comedy Harvey’s Boy is sore all over. However, there’s nothing morbid or crass about this one-man show. Stewart’s reminiscences about his childhood and young adulthood add up in the end to a warm tribute to the folks who raised him.
Perhaps Stewart’s dad was a bit too stern. Perhaps it was hard for an engineer to understand a child who was “sensitive, artistic and a Democrat.” But the aches and pains of Stewart’s humor are not really due to family dysfunction. They’re the ordinary daily sorrows of a child who grows up a little out of place, a little insecure and maybe a tad too self-deprecating.
The stage at Chicken Lips Comedy Theater is littered with the furniture and ordinary objects one might find in any mountain town–in this case, the community of Climax. A large white cloth hangs from the ceiling, and slides are projected onto it: family pictures featuring Stewart on a pony with his little sister or swimming with his dad, his mother at different ages, and so on. There’s no chronological order, but we get the picture–this evening will be a smattering of memories that come together like a kaleidoscope, shaping a life. Even the music, a jazzy version of “Amazing Grace,” reminds us that artists use all the raw material of their lives (and perhaps especially of childhood) in their art.
When a musical fanfare rises and stops as if the hero were about to enter, the self-mockery (we are all heroes of our own stories) is particularly sweet. It gets funnier when the fanfare repeats and is followed by silence; the hero neglects to rush out to bow. Eventually, he does appear–and tears down the cloth on which the slides have been projected.
We learn about the mountain town in which Stewart grew up: The school was so small you could to go to senior prom in the seventh grade; Reverend Weed was so boring he once fell asleep during one of his own sermons; the 23rd Psalm was never explained to eight-year-old Dale, so it scared him. His mother, Peggy, was the most beautiful woman in the world, and he called her “Perfect Peggy.” She played the organ for church services and belonged to a bridge club. He’d pretend to be sick just so he could stay home from school to be with her. His father once whipped him for coming home late from a party and then whipped him again when Stewart apologized for smoking (a painful slip if ever there was one).
The boys at school thought he was a sissy because he loved Esther Williams movies. Or maybe they thought he was a sissy because of the way he ran. His grandmother made the best pies in the world, and when she died peacefully in her sleep, he cried for the pie she left in the oven, burned to a crisp. He loved the movies, and Dustin Hoffman was a classmate in acting school. His mother suffered from a long-term illness. His father was robust.
All of these quiet little things make up the details of a life, but they also contain within them the seeds of comedy and tragedy. Stewart shapes them for us–nervously and hesitantly at times. He weeps for Peggy. He discovers something shattering about himself when his father dies. He is able to articulate gratitude and forgiveness, anger and disappointment, love and loneliness in ways that are helpful–and entertaining–to the rest of us.
Stewart can be flamboyant, but one of the most charming things about the evening is his more typical diffidence. There is something childlike in it, though finally this performance piece offers a mature reading of one man’s struggle to make sense of it all.
Harvey’s Boy, in an open-ended run at Chicken Lips Comedy Theater, 17th and Market streets, 534-4440.