Celebration Theatre
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“Autobiographical solo shows are often a theater critic’s bane,” said Steven Leigh Morris in LA Weekly. Yet Leslie Jordan’s love of life “saturates every scene” in his funny, eccentric, and touching look back at growing up gay in Chattanooga, Tenn. Jordan, a 2006 Emmy winner for his work in a supporting role on TV’s Will and Grace, was apparently “conspicuously swishy” from a young age, “an imp of a child” who preferred the banter in his mother’s beauty parlor to attending football games with his father, an Army colonel. Inevitably there was tension, especially when the still-teenage Jordan announced that he was going to move to Atlanta and become a female impersonator. But Jordan never resorts to parent-bashing, instead homing in on “the absurdities of gay identity conflicts” through “tender humor.”
“Forever innocent and boy-like,” Jordan almost seems to be literally traveling back to his childhood, said Daryl H. Miller in the Los Angeles Times. All the recollections seem “off the cuff,” yet they “cycle subtly through light and dark,” pulling the audience into deeper levels of the story. Jordan speaks most affectingly of his mother, who seemed to understand from the start that he would face extra challenges and did what she could to help. There are times when Jordan is “a bit too concise,” leaving us wanting more information. But what the audience ultimately gets is an engaging story from a first-rate actor-raconteur.
