Colin Quinn's Long Story Short shifts from New Haven to Chicago this week. Photo by Carol Rosegg from the New York production.
Colin Quinn ends his two-week stand of his one-man show Long Story Short at Long Wharf with two performances today (Sunday the 21st, 3 & 7 p.m.), than heads to Chicago’ Broadway Playhouse Aug. 24-Sept. 10, where I imagine his fiercely friendly discourse on a slew of failed (or just plain funny) social systems will go over like gangbusters.
I did a phone interview with Quinn a few weeks ago. “I like to talk,” he said. “I like to provoke. The world is so politically correct. I want to bring out what’s undiscussed…. Though I wouldn’t say business has been clamoring for my point of view.” He means the TV business, which embraced him briefly as the anchorman on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update (his tag: “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it”), and as the host of Comedy Central’s Last Call With Colin Quinn.
Club dates could be frustrating for him too. “Stand-up audiences get drunk. The way they set the clubs was just bad. In clubs, people are facing each other.”
When I observe that’s his routines are smart, Quinn sighs “That doesn’t help either.”
But in the theater, his mannered, structured, longform common-sense commentary on current events (and eons-ago events) plays beautifully. Bolstered by Jerry Seinfeld’s active involvement as director (“This guy spent more time on this, for nothing”) and strong reviews from the original New York run, he’s found audiences reliably receptive everywhere he’s played. “Sure, I did it in the Hamptons, Philly and Montreal. The Hamptons, it was a more politically correct audience than the other places, but they were all pretty much the same.”
Describing the act as concerning “Richie Rich, Poory Poor” and international conflicts, Quinn’s working off a tight script but will add new current-events jokes as necessary. Some key material about the Arab Spring and the U.S. deficit near-default was jumped in since the New York run.
The rehearsed rhythms can actually be comforting. Or as Quinn puts it, “Spontaneous can be great, but it can also be smoke and mirrors.”
But he also clearly thinks well on his feet. He deflected a mic glitch at the Long Wharf deftly, even though technical problems could really skew the flow of his mock-irritable oration.
When I ask specific questions about the difference between his theater and club performance experiences, Colin Quinn quickly considers the question, then spits out a marvelously articulate thought-through response about how he felt trying to break through to stand-up audiences with his heavier concepts and material. He describes his frustration, how the set-up of the clubs was an obstacle, how it was an uphill battle. He ends with a metaphor drawn from the same militaristic vocabulary with which he smartly peppers Long Story Short: “I’m not gonna not do stand-up, but it got hard doing what I wanted to do.”
“ I was like an arrogant colonialist. I’m gonna civilize these people!”
Right after this bravura answer, so eloquent he could have been reading it off a page, he says “Congratulations. I’ve done a lot of these [interviews], but nobody’s ever asked me that before.”
I’m beaming, of course, but moreover I’m just impressed. This is the essence of Colin Quinn: fiery, unfiltered, concise, clear, to the point, in your face and unfailingly polite.
Your friend who fills you in on the tough facts: Things have been bad for a while. You have irrational rage problems; we all do. Life’s not fair. Hollywood gets it wrong. You should have paid attention in history class. Your country may be cheating on you. We need a few more drinks to get over this.
This is the guy I want to talk about the fall of civilization with. Long may he reign.