Kate Berlant’s Killer Solo Show Is All About Losing Control

Actress and standup comedian Kate Berlant is always sure to remind people she didn’t get where she is by taking classes. “I was rejected from acting school,” she tells Rolling Stone. “I have no formal training.” But her one-woman show, Kate, which came to Los Angeles last month (well, technically Pasadena) after previous runs in New York and London, is deeply concerned with questions of artistic lies and emotional truth. It’s also brutally funny.

“It’s my favorite place the show has been,” Berlant says of the Pasadena Playhouse, though she had some nerves about the size of the venue — at almost 700 seats, it’s her largest audiences — and was told to expect an older crowd of local subscribers who might not immediately jibe with her metatextual, self-sabotaging humor. Instead, the regulars ate it up. Before the show begins, a title card on a screen sternly commands viewers to introduce themselves to their neighbors, which is how I met Dina, a lovely woman who told me she plans to get a tattoo when she turns 80, and I can confirm that she enjoyed Berlant immensely.

But the raucous success of Kate in its Hollywood iteration has less to do with age demos than the industry that dominates this town: Berlant performs as a pretentious, ill-tempered version of the indie phenomenon she actually is, yet her character’s instinct for shameless ladder-climbing is too authentic to write off as schtick. Just about every reviewer has noted how theatergoers first walk into a lobby where Berlant sits silently scrolling her phone and wearing a sign that says “IGNORE ME,” whereas nearby, contradictory instructions read “Photography Encouraged” — a quick distillation of the quintessential hack performance artist. Less has been written about the show’s slideshow overture, which includes a screenshot of Berlant’s IMDb credits, making it clear that this is her audition for future film and television roles. And a running gag à la Waiting for Guffman (Berlant is driven to distraction by the promised attendance of an important executive from Disney+) hits especially hard in a place where dreams of stardom fizzle out like dud fireworks.     

“At some point I started to realize the show’s about failure,” Berlant says. She explains that she “never wanted to do you know the joke of, ‘Oh, the one-woman show in theater is embarrassing.’ We know this. That’s already heavily mined territory. So my greatest fear as I was writing it — sometimes I would be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m making a one-woman show parody. I’m gonna kill myself. Like, This can’t be it.’” That flavor of dread wound up destabilizing the storyline, which begins to collapse as Berlant’s overwrought, faux-memoiristic account of her journey to fame is bedeviled by technical difficulties and her own festering doubts. The former are based on Berlant’s experience with her former stagehand, while the latter will be familiar to any creative who begins to question whether their talents will ever amount to anything.

“Part of the show is the desperation to be taken seriously,” says Berlant, who in a climactic moment must force herself to cry on stage (to a camera that projects her face in a towering close-up image of 4K fidelity, a touch that reflects the influence of Kate’s director, comedian Bo Burnham). As she tries to show that she’s more than an irreverent clown, her straining and grimacing toward tears yields to a tightrope act of suspense you’re unlikely to encounter anywhere in comedy, because, as Berlant’s alter-ego clarifies, the rest of the narrative hinges on this feat. “The other night it took me a while,” she admits, though it’s not about accessing some past trauma. “I like the David Mamet school: acting is athleticism. Like, just do it.”

The catharsis when she does is enough to draw an ovation, and with it comes blubbering apologies from Berlant, who shortly before had been verbally abusing the audience and declaring theater dead as she melted down in the certainty of a career-ending flop. Now she waxes poetic about the communal grace of the medium, the power it has to bridge our souls. It’s another hilarious reversal that reminds us Berlant cares more about validation than principle. Still, it’s far from dishonest. She’s been surprised and touched to see how many theatergoers start crying along with her during this climax.

“A lot of people feel really moved,” she says. “I wasn’t like, ‘I want to make a show that moves people.’ I just wanted to make a show that was funny. I think particularly people from the world of theater see it and they understand my real struggle, this feeling that of physical world being second to the digital one. And that we have to insist on the physical world.”

This is what makes Kate an unforgettable lesson in the advantages of losing control, even if it means succumbing to disaster. The stain of social media and its curatorial pressures are apparent in the quasi-mythic autobiography Berlant is trying to present: in our interview, she points out that while everyone today feels the need to fashion an image of themselves “for consumption,” performers have to contend with an “extra layer structural humiliation” in their bid to be noticed, hired, and admired. Rather than critique this state of affairs from a distance, Kate gives us an idiosyncratic woman chasing that conventional artifice to its extreme — and, upon realizing that she’s caught in a trap, gnawing through her own leg to escape.   

“If you set out to work something profound, and to expose yourself, you’re not going to have guarantees,” Berlant tells Rolling Stone. “But often what can happen is in that effort, if it falls apart, then you maybe do get to something that feels transformative.”