"This show is a plea to everyone to just take a hard look at yourselves, and no matter what you see, just rock the hell out."
So says Seth Weitberg of his new one-man show, "The John Doe Project."
Although it begins and ends at a karaoke bar, "The John Does Porject" is hardly wrought to a prerecorded beat. Weitberg, who graduated from Duke last year and currently lives and performs in Chicago, wrote and performed the show, which premiered at Duke's Branson Theater last weekend. He aims to bring the show to Chicago later this year.
The show, an amalgam of short monologues, features contrasting karaoke bookends, beginning with painfully insecure warbling, and ending with a character singing the same song, rocking out with overconfidence. Weitberg framed the piece as such to highlight the journey of insecurity, the show's through-line.
"It's crucial for a show to have a through-line, and when it's a one-person show, that's even more important.... What started to develop was this group of characters who all seemed really insecure to me, no matter to what degree they actually expressed that. The show itself came to highlight them, " Weitberg said.
The theme is more apparent in some monologues and less in others: strongest were scenes of a sharp-tongued Jewish rapper taking papal potshots and ripping on everything from Yasir Arafat to the cult of the Republicans, and an emotionally servile magical clown exiled from marshmalllow land. The characters, while removed from the realm of recognizability, were disarmingly close to home, with refreshingly pointed political expression. One of the more predictable pieces--featuring a one-sided discussion with a hyperactive and emotionally stunted cop--took new perspective when Weitberg later performed the other side of the conversation, in what could have been a scene from a house off East Campus.
Weitberg is strongest at his most outrageous, and this is also when his themes of insecurity become apparent, through seemingly superficial characters' emotional depth.
"I know the whole message of the show is very easily lost," he said, "because you're at a comedy, and you just want to laugh and enjoy it, but I hope people take a second to think about what it might be trying to say, too.... It really is an extension of my voice. The best advice I got in the writing process was to write the show I wanted to write and not the one I thought the audience wanted to see."
As Weitberg, who participated in Duke University Improv as an undergraduate, moves the show to Chicago, he plans to rewrite and expand the material, echoing the process that brought it to Duke, honing sentences and performance beats up until its premiere. He'll be entering "The John Doe Project" in a festival of solo shows at the ImprovOlympic, where he also trains. In Chicago he also performs at the Second City Skybox Theater and trains at the Second City Conservatory. He also teaches elementary school, in what he calls his biggest acting job to date.
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