Blown Sideways Through Life

Everything that made me a misfit in the world made me right for the theater, Claudia Shearer decided. Michelle Gardner, wonderfully genuine as the author, takes us through 64 jobs she was unsuited for. With energetic, compelling force she makes the 65th -- this tour de force--a success, personally and professionally. Simplicity is the key, including the set (a glass-paneled backdrop that changes backlit colors moodily) and props consisting of a large elevated platform with steps and a ladder at one side.

Claudia/Michelle wears off-the-rack big shirt over tee, sheer patterned skirt over midi-tights, and Doc Martins, and convinces whether she's modeling nude for a monomaniac artist, answering phones in a bordello, selling cosmetics at Bloomingdale's or (many times) waitressing. Impersonating myriad bosses barking orders, she obeys with obligatory "Smile!"s or displays "bad attitude." Proving "there's nothing worse than the first day of a new job," being nervous and on display, Claudia also acknowledges the perks. She recalls lying at 14 to get her first "grown-up job," cleaning toilets. She strikes a chord with her Florida summer audience: "Imagine being so young that you want to be older." (Ahhhh!)

Gardner makes her own the script encompasses story-telling, acting out scenes, impersonating, commenting, confessing. Whether she's ten bosses in a row bawling or throwing her out or herself cramming fencing and French lessons into her anything but routine life, Claudia remains fat and sassy, "outside the pale" and traveling through Dante's Inferno but never losing sight of getting to Paradise.

"I had no critical distance," says Claudia of her well-behaved stint in the office of Joseph Papp's Shakespeare Festival. Gardner, skillfully directed by Victoria Holloway, makes her audience feel the same. No matter that her Italian film adventure is too long, her bordello scenes is so amusing (and revealing) that we'd like more. At her final dance, we'd like to ask her for another. And if ever a gig called for extending, this is it.