I can’t imagine a more entertaining person to hang with for 90 minutes than the absolutely adorable Murphy Funkhouser. It’s what’s best about the Denver comedian’s very funny and personal memoir, “Crazy Bag,” a one-woman show with a tagline that writes itself: “Vagabond single mother with baggage unloads all the junk in her trunk.”
But that immense likability is also what prevents her smart and well-written piece from ending with full emotional impact in performance.
Ms. Funk tries to make her audience like her just as hard as her audience tries to like her back. And I think, in the end, we’re both probably trying a bit too hard.
Her buzz-worthy run at the Vintage Theatre, just extended through July 20 and launching a national tour, begins cute. Set against a bouncy Gnarls Barkley tune (“Crazy,” natch), a smiling Funkhouser drags more bags onto the stage than a United carousel at DIA. Each represents baggage from a different chapter in her life. Girl needs to unpack, and tonight she’s going to dust Pandora’s menagerie clean. Funkhouser beats this metaphor like a rug in a dust bowl, but it’s a good theatrical structure.
The particulars of Funkhouser’s life story aren’t what make Funkhouser particularly remarkable. She’s a minister’s daughter who got kicked out of Bible college. She partied too hard, lived out of her car, got pregnant and straightened herself out. Not an altogether uncommon tale. Life can be a very self-destructive undertaking.
It’s the young woman who emerged from all that — (adorably) damaged and yet ferociously ebullient. It’s also that Funkhouser is a solid writer and expert comedian who knows how to pen and pack a punch line.
There are all kinds of neat theatrical touches, notably the life-size cardboard cutout of Funkhouser’s bad- girl alter ego. She a smoker with high-heel Nancy Sinatra boots, frayed fishnet stockings and, oh, that low-cut black dress. With our perky good-girl heroine constantly doing battle with her inner heathen, Funkhouser and her posterboard make for a pretty good comedy team.
As the narrative breezily progresses, one would correctly assume that Funkhouser is setting us up for a more substantive climax. Her confession is undeniably, horribly real — yet somehow doesn’t feel all that real on the stage.
The most effective solo stage memoirs — Hal Holbrook’s “Mark Twain Tonight” and Martin Moran’s “The Tricky Part” come to mind — are those that come across as simple conversations between actor and audience — even if the actor is doing all the talking.
Funkhouser is “performing” for us — exhaustively — from the first second to the last. She’s working so hard to entertain us, she makes Sally Field seem ungrateful. She builds to her particular ending because she’s smart — she knows it’ll rip your heart out. But for that brave moment of catharsis to make full visceral impact, any hint of facade, veneer or performance must by then be stripped away.
Here it’s not. It may be presumptuous to suggest that something so evidently real in her life doesn’t ring altogether true from the stage. (Funkhouser’s mom was seeing the show for the first time the night I attended. That’s real.) And yet, for me, it didn’t.
All of this staging’s added showmanship — the preciousness of the acting, the lights and sounds, the soft-rock soundtrack (including Pink, Bonnie Tyler and Chantal Kreviazuk) — actually becomes a barrier preventing us from fully feeling Funkhouser’s cathartic and courageous ending.
Director Christopher Willard is a master at sheparding the one-person show. He’s responsible for Karen Slack’s triumphant “The Syringa Tree” and will next embark on an original, multimedia comic innovation that will spotlight the unique comic talents of Heritage Square Music Hall funnyman Charlie Schmidt.
So much that’s good is already evident in his collaboration with Funkhouser. If, together, they can create more of an emotional arc, transitioning from early showmanship to an ending of naked truth, then Funkhouser and her “Crazy Bag” might really be packing their bags for theatrical greatness.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
“Crazy Bag” *** (out of four stars)
Comic one-woman memoir. Vintage Theatre, 2119 E. 17th Ave. Written and performed by Murphy Funkhouser. Directed by Christopher Willard. 90 minutes. Through July 20. 7:30 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. June 29; 6 p.m. July 13 and 20 (no shows July 4-6). $17-$22. 303-839-1361 or .
Read a script sample
To read a short script sample from “Crazy Bag,” .
