Gary Gulman Clings to Grandiloquence
It is painful to note that a show called Grandiloquent is too long. It’s even more painful when the subject of Grandiloquent, Gary Gulman’s Off Broadway production, is a flinching and tender defensiveness about not being accepted at one’s full, grandiose rhetorical length. “‘Oh, get the hook!’” he recalls his mother telling him when he’d tell a long story. “‘Genug!’” she’d say, the Yiddish word for “enough.” “It felt like I was being heckled by my ancestors.” This show is a repudiation of that fear, a way for Gulman to talk through how he’s tried to reclaim some confidence, to move past the childhood wound of being unsupported and underestimated. He can stand on a stage and hold a crowd’s attention. He can go long. And — crucially for a performer best established as a stand-up comedian — he doesn’t have to be funny the entire time to do it. Funny is a way to sidestep the fear of acceptance, and he is no longer willing to rely on it as a crutch. Just because Gulman can go long, though, does not always mean that Grandiloquent makes the best use of that time.
It’s not an issue of joke density. Gulman, ever charming and almost inexcusably magnetic, holds the stage for the show’s over-90-minute runtime, and his ability to spin out ideas and embody vulnerability means that Grandiloquent often succeeds at doing exactly what he says he most wants it to do. He wants to be on a stage without having to perpetually reach for a punch line. He needs the freedom to explore a broader emotional palette and to allow the audience to sit with heavier moments without immediately moving to release that tension. Grandiloquent does all of that, several times over, and its broader balance of snappy joke-jokes, winking references, weighty self-reflection, and galaxy-brain meta-self-commentary is plenty effective at holding the whole thing together.
The show considers several periods in Gulman’s life but focuses most intensely on his early elementaryhood and his father’s decision to force Gulman to repeat the first grade. That choice was not wholly responsible for everything that came after; Gulman was already prone to anxiety and was primed by both his parents’ divorce and his bookish softness to get bullied and to feel lonely. But repeating the first grade became a seismic, definitive experience for Gulman, a calamitous undermining of whatever self-assurance he’d once had. It “ruined” him, he says, eventually leading to so much self-loathing and anxiety that, “at 7 years old, I had all the symptoms of a major depressive disorder.” Gulman considers this time of his life while also wrapping it with multiple layers of thematic gauze. He begins with the picture book The Monster at the End of This Book, Jon Stone and Michael Smullin’s Sesame Street tie-in that also happens to be a postmodern masterpiece, but he quickly moves on to a half-dozen other conceptual frames. There’s Frankenstein and the joy and mortification of pedantry; the awkward dislocation of being an unusually verbose kid; and sections on whether you actually have to be grateful for the trauma that shapes you, the transformative self-expression of writing, and Gulman’s parents and their marriage, plus a long tangent on post-grunge supergroups.
More often than not, there’s ample material in the veins Gulman chooses to mine. He’s especially fascinating on the particular textures of a 1970s childhood, an area he also discussed in his 2019 comedy special, The Great Depresh, and his ability to observe, resent, criticize, and lovingly portray his parents gives those portions of Grandiloquent an added emotional oomph. The sections in which he recalls the particular pain of being in that second round of first grade are also excruciating and arresting. He’s skilled at moving both within and outside of those horrible memories and has the knack of expressing his childhood terror without sliding into shrugging dismissal or over-the-top melodrama. It does not take long before Gulman demonstrates that one of Grandiloquent’s tics, its constant and seemingly smug display of literary references and hifalutin vocabulary, is really evidence of the comedian’s deep-seated insecurity. He is smart! There he is on a stage, wearing a professorial tweed suit and glasses, surrounded by shelves and shelves of books. But the shelves are comically large; they dwarf his impressive six-foot-six frame. One of them has collapsed, and its books are strewn across the floor. All of it’s a cover, and the veneer of confidence is wearing thin.
Too often, though, Grandiloquent suffers from precisely the things Gulman is most worried about proving. It is so full of ideas, so anxious to include so many different contexts and angles and takeaways, that it cannot fully rest on any one of them long enough for it to unfurl beyond the initial hit recognition. The glimpse of Gulman’s father, for instance, is striking and full of suggested friction, but he’s not given enough space to be adequately explored as a character. The Monster at the End of This Book meta angle begins with promise but sputters over the next 90 minutes despite the clear connective tissue of a Frankenstein’s-monster motif, only to return at the end without sufficient transformative addition. The run of post-grunge supergroup material requires going on at great length so that Gulman can make his point — excessive displays of knowledge are a shield against underestimation and critique — but in order to continue for long enough to be funny, the joke unbalances the last half-hour of the production. And, as with his father, it leaves open the unexplored figure of Gulman’s wife, sitting patiently in this car with him while trapped in a lecture about musical history that’s more about demonstrating his anxiety than about appealing to the listener’s interest.
In the end, this is what hampers Grandiloquent the most. Gulman is a canny, affable performer who is more than capable of entertaining an audience for two hours. But that does not mean that the way Grandiloquent presents its ideas, and especially the way it continually moves from one metaphor to another, ultimately coheres into a singular vision of how Gulman now sees himself or, especially, of how he now sees his own relationship to the art form he has worked in for 31 years. He says he has an “aversion to criticism” because he experienced so much of it as a child, and it has led to spending his life “crafting everything I say in my head before I say it, so the person will find me agreeable and likable and smart.” This makes sense for one’s personal life, but it’s also a reality of standing on a stage and presenting a story for an audience, regardless of whether that story is funny or sad. Gulman, again and again, has proven his ability to capture and retain attention. Grandiloquent continually requests acceptance, but it is built on an assumption that acceptance will come as long as Gulman keeps providing more — more stories, more lessons, more metanarratives, more discoveries. But not all additions are additive; sometimes they only complicate and distract from what works. By the time Gulman says the show’s title, around an hour into the show, Grandiloquent has proven its point. Less would have been enough.
Grandiloquent is at the Lucille Lortel Theatre through February 8.
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