Elf Lyons is a clown comic who makes weird concept shows like her last one, Horses, which involved her playing the role of multiple horses, several of whom die. A singular talent, she’s certainly on the popular end of the esoteric but she also always seemed destined to be the definition of a cult artist.
Might something as humdrum as a breakup change that?
Well maybe, although it’s all done in a very Elf Lyons-ish way. For at least the first 10 minutes there is no way you’d even begin to suspect that’s what was up, as Lyons – in an elaborate cocktail dress with enormous sleeves that keep slipping off distractingly – wanders in on barefoot tippy toes (as if she were wearing high heels) and launches into a breathy, faux femme-fatale film-noir accent as she takes a series of phone calls from ‘her husband’ (on bananas). ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ she asks. Dry ice pours out of her dress.
Eventually she gets an audience member up to read a script, which she lip syncs to as he reads it. The script divulges that last year, she broke up with her fiancé just a couple of months before her wedding, and as the show wears on it becomes clear that she was utterly devastated by this.
Woman on the Edge is a mass of dissociations: the ’40s screen-siren character is an abstract avatar of Lyons’ grief and the marriage that never was, which is for the most part only addressed via the script read by the audience member and by recordings (also lip synced to) of friends detailing what a mess she became, especially during the Australian tour of Horses.
The classic joke about a doctor recommending that his depressed patient see Pagliacci the Clown that night, only to be informed his patient is Pagliacci the Clown, is repeatedly invoked, partly for obvious reasons, partly as a lead in to the fact that Lyons channeled her sadness into eloping on an ill-advised two week holiday to Thailand with a manbaby-ish Australian clown she met on tour. There’s also a whole thing about her fascination with the Apollo 13 lunar mission, which is an impressively double-edged metaphor for both the possibility of healing herself but also why emotionally immature middle-aged men suck.
It is a proper tour de force of a show, that starts weird and gets weirder, with a real Mulholland Drive thing going on at points. But it also builds symphonically, its meanings gradually unfurling and becoming clearer and Lyons’ reclaiming control of her own narrative and becoming a stronger presence, from a virtual ghost to full-on incandescent.
Of course, she’s a craftswoman and was hardly out of control when she stepped on the stage. But there is a sense of rupture and devastation to the beginning and middle that is followed by the elation of repair during an extraordinary final passage that’s roared at the top of her lungs as she slingshots back to us like the stricken Apollo craft’s defiant escape. You’d think nobody would have anything new to say about having their heart broken at this stage in human history, but Elf Lyons would prove you wrong.
