As Carol Klyce performs at The Marsh Berkeley, a garment from her childhood, the only memento she still has, hangs behind her in this screenshot.
By WOODY WEINGARTEN
Shortly after her mother dies of ovarian cancer, her father, a drunk, vanishes into the ozone. Not that much later, she’s forcibly separated her from her four siblings.
“Sometimes,” Carole Klyce admits, “I would just run into the woods and scream and cry.”
The pain and fear are too much. So she runs away.
From a group foster home this time. And next, when the state erroneously labels her an incorrigible troublemaker and starts the paperwork to put her in a mental institution, she runs away.
She runs away from a juvenile correction facility, too.
Into the clutches of a child molester. Into the employ of the Mafia.
And she runs away from both of them as well.
Photograph of Carole Klyce as she is today (by Cynthia Smalley).
Her monologue at The Marsh Berkeley reveals an endless need as a teenage runaway to change her name, her appearance, her skills. She even needs to masquerade as a boy.
Sounds like the life-fodder for a fascinating, emotional, one-person show, doesn’t it? Well, despite Klyce doing her best, her opening night merges all those elements but somehow leaves out the inherent tension, the intensity, the melodrama.
Klyce and director Deb Fink neglect to give different weights to differing story elements. The memoir becomes as exciting as if the playwright/performer were reading an elongated list of streaming channels.
Flight Risk, which runs through June 20, holds promise. But the two-hour, intermission-less show could be pared at least 30 minutes, maybe more, including irrelevant, unnecessary references to JFK and other tangential items. That at least might ensure the monologue not feeling like one incredibly long run-on sentence.
Much more attention also needs to be given the pacing and pitch. And to potential sequences of poignancy, like when she takes charge of her nuclear family at age 12 (including care and feeding of her dying mother), and when she develops a close relationship with her grandfather (“my best friend”), who also dies.
The show might well amplify some of her life’s lowlights sandwiched between a hopeful static-laden recording of “Tomorrow” from Annie and the playwright-performer’s 18th birthday party. It’s certainly important to be able to figure out where she is when she’s bouncing from one place to another (“I can’t remember the last time I took a bath in a real bathtub.”).
Klyce, now a mother of three, grandmother of four, deserves credit for her bravery, for being honest and vulnerable in a show that details six of her teenage years that are vastly more horrific than that of your average kid.
One Saturday evening audience, clearly packed with her friends and supporters, distinctly veered from any negative assessment, however, mildly gasping and otherwise reacting to moments of imminent physical or mental danger or angst, chuckling at almost every gag line or comedic movement, and giving a wrinkled, weathered Klyce a rousing ovation as she bowed.
Flight Risk will run at the Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley, through June 20. Tickets: $25 to $35; reserved seats, $50 or $100; plus $3 convenience fee per ticket. Info: 425-282-3055 or boxoffice@themarsh.org.
Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime voting member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.comand https://vitalitypress.com. His books include Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner’s breast cancer, aimed at male caregivers; MysteryDates — How to keep the sizzle in your relationship; The Roving I, a compilation of 70 of his newspaper columns; and Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates, a whimsical fantasy intended for 6- to 10-year-olds that he co-authored with his then 8-year-old granddaughter.
