Cat Cohen has built a comic persona around the conviction that the spotlight is not merely desirable but morally correct. That makes Broad Strokes, her new musical cabaret at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, an unusually apt vehicle for a story that begins with the body doing something terrifyingly beyond anyone’s control.
The premise is stark: Cohen survived a near-fatal stroke at 30. Her response is a show made of comedy, music and the heightened self-presentation that has long defined her work. The contrast is not an attempt to make a medical crisis cute. It is a way of refusing the solemnity that can descend on stories of illness until the person at their center disappears beneath a lesson about gratitude.
Cohen’s stage character has always treated narcissism as both joke and fuel. She sings about desire, humiliation, romance and ambition with the composure of someone hosting an awards ceremony in her own honor. The persona is useful here because illness threatens exactly that kind of authorship. A body can suddenly impose a plot no performer would choose. Turning the experience into cabaret is a method of taking the microphone back.
Cabaret is particularly suited to that reclamation. It tolerates abrupt changes of tone that conventional narrative often tries to smooth away. A joke can sit next to fear; a song can make an emotion larger rather than more reasonable; an audience can laugh and then discover that the laugh has opened a door to something darker. The form does not demand that survival become inspirational.
The room changes the story
The Lucille Lortel Theatre also gives the show a useful downtown scale. The Christopher Street house has been central to Off-Broadway for generations, and its intimacy changes the contract between comic and audience. At a large theater, bravado can become spectacle. In a smaller room, it becomes social. The performer can seem to be addressing individual people even while controlling the entire crowd.
There is a long tradition of comedians turning catastrophe into material, but the phrase can make the process sound automatic, as though bad experience enters one end of a machine and jokes emerge from the other. The more interesting work involves deciding what remains private, what becomes narrative and which version of oneself gets to tell it. A comic persona is not necessarily a mask that conceals the truth. Sometimes it is the instrument capable of approaching it.
Cohen’s musical instincts add another complication. Singing makes irony difficult to maintain indefinitely. A comic can undercut a sentence immediately; melody has a way of lingering after the joke has moved on. That tension between the ridiculous and the sincere has always been central to her appeal. In a show about mortality, it has higher stakes.
Cat Cohen: Broad Strokes is currently playing at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher St. The show joins a busy fall Off-Broadway season with a reminder that the distance between a nightclub act, a musical and an autobiographical play can be only a few piano chords.
The medical event also changes the familiar comedy of self-obsession. Before a crisis, exaggerated vanity can be treated as a character flaw or comic pose. After the body has demonstrated its capacity to interrupt everything, attention to the self acquires another meaning. Survival makes the continued existence of the person onstage feel less like a premise than a fact worth examining, though Cohen’s style is unlikely to permit that fact to remain solemn for long.
Music gives her a way to enlarge the contradictions. Cabaret songs can be ridiculous and emotionally exact at the same time, particularly when the performer is willing to let polish collide with oversharing. Cohen’s comedy often lives in that collision. She can present a thought with the grandeur of a torch song even when the thought itself is petty, horny, frightened or absurd.
That makes Broad Strokes less interesting as a conventional survival narrative than as a question of authorship. A frightening event happened to Cohen. The show is what happens when she decides how it will be remembered in public. The difference between those two things, experience and performance, is where much of autobiographical theater becomes art rather than testimony.
