The Art Academy Auditorium is not a particularly friendly space for theater, especially if the show requires audio-visual tech. New York City artist Carly Ann Filbin’s Validate Me suffered from disjointed audio tracks and distracting out-of-sync screen prompts. But more basic than that, the script was simply too narrow to pull the audience into Carly’s whiny world. Indeed, of the three Fringe shows I saw on Thursday, this was the only one that did not a full house.
Carly needs validation for everything, and she wants your help: her looks, her clothes, her coy or hurtful thoughts toward friends. You hated girls like this in high school because they were usually very pretty and very popular, but oh so sad because they just weren’t pretty enough. (Even if they were way prettier than you.) During the show, the audience was prompted to validate her performance by reading out loud words or phrases flashed onto the screen behind her. Perhaps if the technical coordination was better, these moments could have helped the show.
She recruited a man from the audience to join her on stage to act out a dating scene. She insisted that he recite the script as read, shared a few laughs, but this bit did not add buzz or move the action forward.
Truly, after about 20 minutes of this meandering performance that centered on lame sexual encounters with losers (herself included), the show just faded away. We have seen this desire to be validated in Al Franken’s Stuart Smalley character. Validate Me seemed about 30 minutes too long and did not expand on Franken’s long-ago classic.
Joe Gorman is a songwriter, playwright, screenwriter and community organizer as well as the developer of five hillside houses on Mulberry Street in Over-the-Rhine.
Read the official 32-page FRINGE FESTIVAL GUIDE here and find the full performance lineup here.
This article appears in May 27 – Jun 2, 2015.