Solo Performances

Solo Performances. Ever since Aeschylus added the second actor, theatre has thrived on the dramatic possibilities of two or more characters on stage at the same time. So it is surprising to find playwrights and actors returning to solo dramas two thousand years later and exploring the theatrics of a lone performer. Most one‐man shows in the distant past were more in the form of a dramatic lecture, such as the celebrated speaking tours by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens in the 19th century, though both authors also acted out scenes from their novels . Hal Holbrook and Emlyn Williams successfully re‐created those famous performances in the 20th century, giving the two most popular solo performances of the 1950s and 1960s. Also in the last century, some performers specialized in evenings of monologues, most memorably Ruth Draper and Cornelia Otis Skinner. But the risky economics of theatre and the desire by talented performers to brave an entire evening on their own led to some very satisfying one‐person shows beginning in the 1970s. Most of these involved the re‐creation of historical and liter‐ary people, such as Henry Fonda's portrayal of Clarence Darrow (1974) and Julie Harris's portrait of Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amhurst (1976). These and other solo plays were written and directed by others, so the performer was in effect in a traditional play; it just happened to have only one character. But in the 1990s solo performances started to change. The performer became the author and sometimes even the subject. Anna Deavere Smith created her own script from interviews with real people, then played all the characters in one‐person programs such as Fires in the Mirror (1992) and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994). Eric Bogosian portrayed a whole gallery of odd‐ball people in his self‐written pieces. Others, such as John Leguizamo and Charlayne Woodard, played themselves, writing and performing autobiographical programs in which they re‐created scenes from their youth and portrayed all of their family members as well as neighbors, friends, and enemies. By the end of the century, solo performances came in many forms. Playwrights turned to writing one‐person shows and producers presented them because they were economically viable. Even a Broadway production could turn a quick profit on a solo performance if the lone performer had box office appeal. Among the many other actors to find recent success in such shows were Rob Becker, Sandra Bernhard, Margaret Cho, Olympia Dukakis, Eve Ensler, Amy Freed, Sherry Glaser, Spalding Gray, Danny Hoch, Barry Humphries, Mark Linn‐Baker, Priscilla Lopez, Jackie Mason, Christopher Plummer, Mark Setlock, Claudia Shear, Frank Gorshin, Torah Feldshuh, and Patrick Stewart.