Gary Corbin, FOUR ONE-LEGGED MEN

One of my biggest regrets about this year's festival (and I don't have many) is that the overload of events has meant that some shows have ended up with very small audiences. (In my experience, one-person shows by male performers are the hardest sell around, and have been for years.) That's especially unfortunate in the case of Gary Corbin, who came in from NYC to present his solo ...four one-legged men!. My own schedule meant that I didn't get to see his show until Saturday, but I met him a few weeks before the festival started and was immediately struck by his energy and his dedication. (He's also just plain incredibly sweet.)

The one comment I heard from someone who saw the show before me was "It's really ... intense." Corbin had told me the basic outline of the work, so I figured I had a pretty good idea about it going in, but I was still floored. This is raw, unvarnished theater of the best kind.

It's exactly what it sounds like: brief character sketches, basically first-person short stories, about four men from four different eras who have only one thing in common: they (like Corbin himself) have only one leg. Each of them has arrived at this condition in a different way, and they've each dealt with it differently. One, for instance, is a married guy in the 1950s, whose marriage is falling apart partly because he cares more for his mother-in-law than his wife. (Here, he's impersonating one of the wife's friends:)



Another is a gay man, reminiscing about his adventures at a bathhouse in the 70s:



Here's another picture of that character, because I like 'em both:



There's also a present-day man whose visit to the nursing home where his adoptive parent now lives forms a kind of frame for the show. But most devastating of all is the final character, a Vietnam-era vet who dreamt of being a dancer before getting drafted. I get goosebumps as I replay in my head the very last moments of the play, which are both heartbreaking and totally inspirational. Trust me, you've never seen anything like it.

Corbin's vignettes are remarkably detailed; we get very specific bits and pieces of each man's experience. The whole show is an act of exposure: he's dressed for the dead of winter in the first scene, and with each successive sketch, a few more layers come off, in more ways than one. (In)visibility is a recurring theme: this is a chance to look straight at the kind of people we often try to ignore away.

I'm pretty sure the show is headed for Off Broadway in October, and if there's any justice in the world, it'll cause a sensation there. You've only got one more chance to see it here--Sunday at 5:30 at the Allen Street Dance Studio--and it would be wonderful to send him off with a packed house.