One-man shows focus on comedy of discontent
By KAREN SHADE, 8/9/2007
Justin McKean talks evangelism, church buses and Christian dating in the comedy "Born Again Yesterday" starting this weekend at the Nightingale Theater. JOY LEWIS / Tulsa World
Two one-man shows opening at the Nightingale Theater this weekend share little more than a similar title.
In fact, "Born Screaming in America" and "Born Again Yesterday" take their audiences on two different experiences exploring religion, drugs, music and war.
Brian Rattlingourd will portray a man who continues to be praised among the comic elite but only began to find attention from the mainstream in the months leading up to his death in 1994 at age 32.
"Born Screaming in America: A One-man Tribute to Bill Hicks" is exactly that — Rattlingourd's homage to the howling social satirist/ comedian who took on American apathy and ranted (sometimes aggressively) for independent thought.
"I think it was just his presence alone, and like David Letterman said, here was this guy that came out with a swagger ... 'Nobody knows me. Too bad. I don’t care,'" said Rattlingourd, who grew up in Tahlequah.
The show had its local premiere in June at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center for SummerStage.
He created the show from Hicks' canon of recorded stand-up material as a project to finish his graduate studies at Louisiana State University of Baton Rouge. But he also wrote part of the script to show how Hicks dealt with his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and how the fatal disease affected his relationships and career.
"It's just a labor of love for me," Rattlingourd said. And he's only performed it a select number of times.
If Hicks was an angry young man about almost everything, Justin McKean specifically directs his discontent at what he calls his fundamentalist Christian upbringing.
For McKean, "Born Again Yesterday" is a comedy painfully born from a close look at the church doctrine he emphatically believed as a youth but grew to question with time. He now considers himself a secular humanist.
A Broken Arrow High School graduate, McKean even hoped to become a minister at one time, but instead studied theater at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas.
For a show based on McKean's experiences as a believer and not, "Born Again Yesterday" tends to attract an audience of like minds, he said.
But when he first performed the show for a Tulsa audience at the Nightingale for one weekend back in May, he said he was satisfied that some people of faith came to see it, including a sincere man he calls "Eddie."
Eddie, a Christian, stayed after the show, but what could have been a tense confrontation turned into a meaningful conversation, McKean said.
"That, to me, is the big deal," he said.
When:
8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, Aug. 17- 18, Aug. 24-25 and Aug. 31-Sept. 1 ("Born Screaming in America" will run Fridays and "Born Again Yesterday" is booked for Saturdays)
Where:
Nightingale Theater, 1416 E. Fourth Street
Tickets:
$8
Note:
Shows contain mature language and themes and are for a mature audience.