The Irish writer/performer Pat Kinevane has become a master-monologist, beginning with Forgotten and Silent in 2006 and 2011, respectively. Now he has come to L.A. with his latest solo piece, Underneath, which he has been developing since 2013 with his usual collaborator, Jim Culleton, head of Fishamble, Dublin’s new-play theatre company. In Underneath, Kinevane, tricked out in fithy black rags and black face–he must be the first performer to black up in L.A. since Al Jolson in 1948!–takes on the persona of a young Irish woman whose brief life was fraught with bad luck and violence. Speaking to the audience from the County Cork cemetery, where she had been buried a few years earlier, after having been murdered by a crazed Dublin barrister with a bad coke habit, “She” tells her story in slangy, blackly-comic working-class fashion, relating how her travails began when she was struck by lightning as a tot and turned into a “mashed-up monsterface mangirl.” Underneath has a “Beauty and the Beast” feel to it. She is scorned and, at times, abused by the “attractive” people, even though she feels attractive on the inside. The ultimate outsider, she gets back at her tormenters by privately poking fun at them, mocking their pretenses and banal behavior (she is never funnier than when satirizing a snootily-rich couple shopping for a dream house on a TV real-estate show). Kinevane portrays her with a compassion that is shot through with anger and pain. Suddenly howling like the trapped, wounded animal she is, Kinevane strikes fear and terror into our hearts. There is madness in Underneath, but just before it goes too far, Kinevane manages to hold back, return to reality with a flash of humor, a stab of irreverence. Culleton’s stage-craft is very much in evidence throughout; the lighting is dark, but there are brilliant touches: a long swathe of golden, shimmering fabric, snatches of song and voices. Kinevane also often breaks the fourth wall by suddenly chatting and joking with the audience. Always confident, charismatic, and in control, he works a lot of theatrical magic during the course of Underneath, using everything he has learned about solo performance to create a memorable character who, to paraphrase William Faulkner, can be defeated but not destroyed.
