Petaluma festival of one-man shows delivers more than laughs

<p>There's a moment that can make or break a theatrical performance, a moment when you can transport or lose an audience. It's a moment when not a word is uttered.</p><!-- Nothing to do. The paragraph has already been output --><p>A moment of silence will get you clobbered in a comedy club, but in a theater, it can be transcendent, said Dave Pokorny, one of five comic actors presenting one-man shows at the Solo Mio festival, just under way at Petaluma's Cinnabar Theater.</p><p>“If there's silence at a comedy club, people yell something out,” he said. “In a theater, you can pause for dramatic affect.”</p><p>And that's a key difference between tossing off jokes and telling a story. In storytelling, there's drama, tension, a narrative arc and likely some exaggeration, Pokorny says.</p><p>“I'm a storyteller. I grew up listening to Bob Newhart and Woody Allen,” he said. “I seek to take the audience on a journey with a payoff at the end.”</p><p>Where did Pokorny learn to tell captivating stories? Traffic school, where he worked between comedy tours. “It was a rough crowd,” he said. “I had to win them over.”</p><p>In all, five performers — including Pokorny, Johnny Steele, Clark Taylor, Fred Curchack and Will Durst — will perform four shows each at the Cinnabar.</p><p>The Solo Mio Festival began Thursday and concludes Feb. 13; on some nights there are two different shows.</p><p>Political satirist Durst, who has spent thousands of nights in comedy clubs around the U.S., said “clubs want a joke every 12 seconds, but in theaters, people listen.”</p><p>Durst's show is called, “The Lieutenant Governor from the State of Confusion.”</p><p>“Everyone in the audience is my constituent,” he said. He plans to deliver a speech, asking for support in his run for re-election.</p><p>Best known for hurling barbs at prominent politicos, especially presidents, Durst said the Bush years were a golden era for political comedians. “I was just one little cog in Bush's No Comic Left Behind program. For those of us going cold turkey on the Bush years, Sarah Palin is methadone.”</p><p>Durst is an equal-opportunity satirist: “You know why Democrats are so behind stem-cell research?” he asked during a phone interview. “They're hoping they can generate a spine.”</p><p>Though confessional solo shows can be a gamble, Cinnabar's artistic director Elly Lichenstein is proud to present this roster of local talent mixing “humorous and touching storytelling, political and social satire, and performance art.”</p><p>“We have five wildly different works,” Lichenstein said, “all premiering at this festival. Sure it's a gamble, but that's what we're here for. This is why Cinnabar exists.”</p><p>Fred Curchack's show, “Synthesis: An Idiot's Guide to Death and Rebirth,” is a riff on “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” and a call to awaken to the true nature of our consciousness.</p><p>The impending birth of his first grandchild and recently “attending two funerals in one week,” has Curchack grappling with issues of birth and death.</p><p>“It doesn't sound like a comedy,” said the part-time San Rafael resident, “but it is.”</p><p>Clark Taylor's show, “Mad'ville” evokes his awkward years as a junior high school student in rural Louisiana as schools were being integrated in the late '60s and early '70s.</p><p>He grew up in St. Tammany province, outside New Orleans. Holding a master's degree in history, Taylor weaves into his show events including the Vietnam War and civil rights movement.</p><p>But the show is less about the “heavy moments” of that era and more about the quirky South.</p><p>Taylor, who recently returned to his family's home after a divorce, wrote the show in the room where he grew up. “It's sad, but real,” he said. “I'm staring at the wall where I hung my black-light posters.”</p><p>Storytelling is his passion, Taylor said, and he's gratified to be able to tell his tales in an intimate theater.</p><p>“There's no fourth wall,” he said. “I can speak directly to the audience. There's more me in this than anything I've done before.”</p><p>Two weeks before the premiere, Taylor was still working on his show, as were a couple of the other performers.</p><p>Pokorny called himself a procrastinator but sees benefits to waiting till the last minute to complete his show: the references will be current. Durst said the skeleton of his show is set, but he'll add riffs on news events.</p><p>And Johnny Steele, a former winner of the San Francisco International Comedy Competition who will present “Johnny's Inferno,” said his show is more “freeform” than “scripted.”</p><p>Steele, who rails against today's American dream of owning a Cadillac Escalade, is never quite sure what he's going to say.</p><p>But this you can count on, because each of these performers is committed to the craft of storytelling: the shows won't just be funny; they will be heartfelt.</p><p><i>Michael Shapiro writes about music and theater for The Press Democrat, michaelshapiro@ yahoo.com.</p><p>Copyright © 2010 PressDemocrat.com — All rights reserved. Restricted use only.</i></p>