The comedian as self-fascinated ego-monster is quite the pose these days. Kate Berlant, Leo Reich and Catherine Cohen recently entered that territory where self-disclosure blurs into grotesque solipsistic caricature. Now Greta Titelman follows them with a show that found some success at last year’s Edinburgh fringe. Like Berlant and Cohen an alumnus of hipster comedy Search Party, Titelman’s hour professes to recap her life story, from bullied nine-year-old dork to grownup Manhattanite bludgeoning down her trauma with joyless threesomes and narcotics.
It works, moment to moment: Titelman is a mesmeric performer, her delivery swooping and soaring from whispers and butter-wouldn’t-melt sing-songs to shrieking into the faces of the front row. The show is top-loaded with the sweet-little-girl shtick, as Titelman plays the blushing junior ambushed by parental discord and a friend at boarding school introducing her to opioids. She is the faux-naif in these scenes, wide-eyed at the discovery of her flair for drug-taking, blithely blackmailing her adulterous dad for a Hervé Leger dress.
Soon enough, though, the innocence fades and Titelman’s elder self is given plenty to shriek about. We trace her journey from Arizona University, where her boyfriend has some unlovely graffiti on his bunk bed, to young adulthood in NYC, beset by heartache, delinquency and cynicism in equal measure. She finds a rich beau, who is winningly sent up, and there’s a droll routine about real v fictional oral sex.
But it adds up to less than the sum of its episodes. The musical moments, reminiscent of Cohen’s in spirit, never quite coalesce into impactful songs. And by the end, Titelman’s twinning of personal tragedy and sordid incident starts to feel wilfully callous. I got impatient for the big reveal (seeded, perhaps, in the title, Exquisite Lies) or retrospective reflection that might justify it, that might make sense of why Titelman is telling us these stories, of where they’ve led her. But we get no such thing, just a show that stops with neither redemption nor conclusion. It leaves a striking impression, but a shallow one.