Review > East 10th Street
WHAT a strange, beautiful and haunting piece of New York gothic is Edgar Oliver’s East 10th Street, playing at the Traverse for the first two weeks of the Fringe.
Set almost entirely in the crumbling Greenwich Village house where Oliver – actor, playwright, and cult off-Broadway hero – has lived for the last 30 years, his one-hour monologue describes in minute and unforgettable detail the inner life of an old rooming-house once inhabited by an astonishing gallery of human grotesques; and it does it in a vocal style so unique – so mannered and drawling, in Oliver’s amalgam of faded Southern elegance and theatrical New York camp – that it almost becomes an art-form in itself.
Some of the material Oliver brings together is intensely comic, in a baroque kind of way. There’s the man in the upstairs room who never visits the bathroom, and is sometimes seen leaving the house with groaning suitcases of excrement; there’s the paranoid midget who lives opposite Oliver and his artist sister, and constantly seeks to maim them by leaving empty wine-bottles draped across the treads of the dark staircase.
But beyond the show’s tales of the bizarre, there’s a sense of true tolerance that eventually becomes both moving and challenging. The lives described here are not conventionally “happy” ones. Most of the characters, including Oliver, are lonely; their love-affairs are tragic at best. But in this show, Oliver boldly asserts the right to live lives that do not conform to normal patterns, and still to be remembered with affection and love. And he also celebrates, in the very fabric of his crumbling house, the physical texture of a 20th-century America that once allowed plenty of scope for freedom, but now seems swept away on a tide of plastic goods, and homogenised culture. In that sense, East 10th Street reflects the same radical American sensibility as Charles Bukowski’s Barflies, at the Barony Bar, and John Clancy’s The Event, at Assembly; his show is an elegy, but also a cry for freedom, drawling, muted, but strong.
Until 24 August. Today 8:15pm.
