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Channel Rat

nytheatre.com review by Lauren Marks
August 15, 2005

Tara Clancy is a good reason to believe in the FringeNYC Festival.When we arrive at her solo show Channel Rat, the stage is dressed only in an unimpressive plastic chair. That chair is soon joined by a small young woman, with bleached blonde hair in a mock-pompadour and tuxedo style shirt with no sleeves. She takes her time, surveys the audience, looks some members directly in the eye and finally speaks (in a heavy Queens accent): “Okay, now you got a good look at me, I got a good look at you, let’s pretend we’re not in a theatre and you didn’t just pay $15 bucks to be here.” She prefers, she says, for us to pretend that we are in a bar, that we have told her some stories about us, and now she will tell us some about her.A one-woman show is always a bit risky; seeing as how if you don’t like one of the actors, you don’t like them all. And especially shows that feature “true stories” can tend easily toward the self-indulgent and the embarrassingly exploitative. But Tara manages to navigate the stories of her life with a good deal of humor, and there is not much she says that isn’t stageworthy. She has an unwaveringly engaging presence and time spent with her onstage passes almost too quickly.Director Kel O’Neill does well to leave Tara mostly to her stories. And, there is no doubt that Tara’s life is worth the telling. Raised by her father in Broad Channel, Queens—whose main features are a aviary preserve and a port-a-potty empire—she grew up a self proclaimed “Channel Rat.” However, in stark contradiction to her admittedly small-time Queens lifestyle was the time she spent with her mother, whose boyfriend was a multi-millionaire (her mother had once been his housekeeper). Tara spent half her time living in a one-room former boathouse with her dad, and the other half at her mother’s boyfriend’s mansion in the Hamptons, where she often arrived by charter jet. She describes negotiating her way through these two disparate universes, wondering in which one she is more of an impostor.Unsurprisingly, Clancy’s upbringing results in a fixation with contradictions and eccentricities, anything that deviates from the norm. She details her fascination with the unusual elderly she encounters, some of them family, others neighborhood strangers, a fascination she claims borders on envy because they are “so much themselves.” Tara makes a hopeful and convincing case by the end of her storytelling as she reads off a collection of words that all basically deal with unpredictable, and sometimes un-reconcilable, strangeness. She says that these are “a bunch of words to remind us that shit don’t make sense.” She says if there are this many words about how “shit doesn’t make sense,” it must be okay when things don’t. So, she concludes, if your own life doesn’t make much sense, don’t panic, there is no cause for alarm—we’re in it together, and it’s not making sense to any of us.