Mr. Insomnia

THEATER BY STEVEN MIKULAN

'LA Weekly' - 1989 May 5-11

Mr. Insomnia - the art of high anxiety

How do you answer when asked to name uniquely L.A. inventions? Jaywalking tickets, midday gridlock and the pronoun "me" are some things that reflexively come to mind, though obviously, none of these originated here. It's just that they so often go with our sandy turf that they seem to have sprung naturally from the soil, like the ubiquitous eucalyptus trees - themselves imports.

Monologist Joe Frank is a person who might be added to the above audit. Imported from New York, he seems to be the embodiment of Angeleno angst - a lonely, inquiring voice drifting out of KCRW's Santa Monica studio every Saturday and Wednesday night. He's also the spokesman of a culture built around first-person pronouns. Frank has become one of the most successful exponents of the art of talking about one's self precisely because he never seems to be, during his forlorn radio narratives. He instead appears to be talking about us and our fears of insignificance, and because of this we accept him as a guide to our own confused lives.

Frank isn't a monologist in the strictest sense - his hour-long radio dramas frequently use other actors. But they, along with the New Age music that invariably wheezes in the background, are marionette-like devices under his creative thumb. Two performances grafted from his show Joe Frank: Work in Progress have recently made the evolutionary leap from airwaves to live stage. Rent a Family (Part 1), is taken from a three-episode series that had won the Major Armstrong Award's first prize and a Public Radio Program Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It's the tale of a business that rents out women and their children to single men who yearn for the family experience without its emotional and legal entanglements. An oversight panel of men reviewing this singular enterprise occupies center stage, while downstage a woman relates her encounter, under the agency's auspices, with what seemed to be Mr. Right. Rent a Family is typically Frankian in its premise's nagging plausibility.

From the plausible, Frank's story moves to the grotesque: longings for companionship - and support are very real, but the degrading context in which actor Grace Zabriskie, as the lonely, unattached mother, expresses them underscores Frank's viewpoint that hell isn't so much other people as it is our pathetic selves. Director Paul Verdier's adaptation of Rent a Family, a production with which Frank is not associated, suffers from the sort of genre static-cling that often accompanies media transitions that aren't wholly successful. The piece's lack of onstage movement precludes any kind of physicality, and what had seemed ironic on the radio merely comes off smarmy in the theater.

'Joe Frank: In Performance', though, features the man and his microphone alone in a 90-minute pastiche of past KCRW shows - and it's a breathtaking display of soul-baring. Gone is the mumbling, shadowless reader who performed with ,Tom Waits and others at 1988's Ionesco tribute, gone is the shield of invisibility protecting the storyteller from his radio audience. Here Joe Frank puts up his presence as collateral for journeys into the psyche, and is clearly rewarded by the response of an auditorium of listeners. For unlike such soloists as Spalding Gray and Kedric Robin Wolfe, Frank never allows us to feel voyeuristic - his gruesomely funny stories are the two-way glass in which we simultaneously see the narrator and ourselves.

Under Paula Mazur's deft direction, Frank wanders about a starkly appointed set to assume his various identities. "I am an insomniac. he begins the evening, neither as a complaint nor as a boast. He is stating the case for many of us in L.A. Whether or not we literally have trouble sleeping at night isn't the point; we are all sleepwalkers searching for friendship and dignity in this city that rolls up its sidewalks after rush hour.

Frank starts out with a story about watching his TV's "Sex Channel" and responding to an ad for an escort service. Twenty minutes after reciting a ridiculously fussy list of requirements (e.g., "Her left buttock should have tattooed on it a verse from the Koran, written in classical Arabic. Failing that, an obscure poem by Joyce Kilmer") over the phone, his dream date arrives - a middle-aged, overweight woman wearing glasses, who apparently has nothing in common with the caller's admittedly tall order. Just as "Maureen" is the complete letdown of Frank's expectations, his instantaneous infatuation with her is in turn completely at odds with our expectation of his response. His falling in love with this homely call girl is a denial of our superficial, appearance-mad society, a denial we would like to think we ourselves are strong enough to abide by.

His relationship with Maureen becomes the evening's leitmotif, recurring in progressions as Frank unravels his life. It is a life dimmed by self-deflation. At one point he lies on a shrink's couch as the analyst unexpectedly begins to talk about his own inner thoughts until he falls asleep; Frank, the patient, turns to the somnolent psychiatrist, facing anew his own ultimate sense of loss - his reason for being there in the first place. Later, he proposes the theory that perhaps humans, have evolved on Earth merely to serve as hosts to races of viruses. "What a downer," he laments. "And I thought I was important."

This ego-shattering notion of our own insignificance threads throughout Frank's performance. He's continually confronted by his own failures: an ex-lover belittles him on the phone, he finds himself trapped on horizontally moving "elevators" that let their passengers off at city street stops. On the other hand, his narrator is a fervent believer in his own personal greatness: he speaks condescendingly to God, and he'll leap onto a woman in the audience to scam on her, only to dump her and hop over to another potential lay.

The Joe Frank persona is capable of the kind of abject behavior of which the audience knows in its heart it is itself capable, as though within every would-be poet there were a tyrant screaming to be released. The Joe Frank persona is capable of the kind of abject behavior of which the audience knows in its heart it is itself capable, as though within every would-be poet there were a tyrant screaming to be re leased. Paradise, both urban and tropical, is frequently suggested by the menacing appearance of a palm-tree shadow. It represents both a paradise-lost L.A. and the killing field each of us suspects we are capable of turning Eden into. At one point Frank agrees to indulge his flair for self-gratification by buying a tiny Caribbean island; soon that island reappears as a tormented hell, and Frank as its megalomaniac dictator. Like dictator, like lover, as it turns out: he eventually tires of Maureen and rejects her, the honeymoon turning into an emotional hangover. In fact, it is a post-honeymoon blues that perpetually reigns over Frank's world, an alert sadness that comes from living in urban promised lands like New York and Los Angeles. It is this knowing melancholy that makes Joe Frank's hilarious accounts of life in hell the perfect antidotes to the smiling superficiality of our Love-Connectioned city.

[picture caption] A lonely, inguinal voice made visible