Eighty or so minutes into the 85 minutes of The Old Man & the Pool, Mike Birbiglia politely requests that the audience stop laughing, then pleads with them, and finally demands a moment of respectful silence. No dice, perhaps due to that not-quite-hidden glint in the eye and the ever-present hint of a Huck Finn grin.
Birbiglia is the stand-up monologist who in 2008 wet his stage feet with the surprisingly delightful Sleepwalk with Me, and whose 2018 celebration of fatherhood, The New One, was notably successful when it played three months at the Cort. If The New One was a heartwarming delight (and it was), The Old Man & the Pool is even—well—deeper.
A spry and seemingly healthy 44-year old, Birbiglia confesses to a history of serious health issues. Thus we have a rumination on severe obstacles which ought not be funny but, in the author’s telling, are positively side-splitting. Along the way he meanders off into myriad tangents—wrestling, chlorine, chicken parmigiana—which provoke torrents of laughter while always circling back to the matter at hand. All the while he reveals himself to be a first-class stage clown with mastery of both verbal and physical arts.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Birbiglia is once again guided by director Seth Barrish, this being their fifth solo-show collaboration. Beowulf Boritt has transformed the stage into a blue wash, backed by an aqua-and-white checked panel that curves above Birbiglia like a skateboarder’s ramp and fills the house with a swimming pool-like incandescence (with lighting by Aaron Copp). It’s hard to say what this background is made of, but at one point the actor astonishes us by springing off it like a vertical trampoline.
The actor wanders on simply dressed, as if just meandering in from the streets of Brooklyn, which maybe he did. Simple but carefully designed: casual blue with gray Allbirds, revealing a sliver of devilishly red socks. Perhaps one of the simplest costumes Toni-Leslie James (of entertainments as diverse as Angels in America and Paradise Square) has contrived, but perfect for the occasion.
This is the part of the review where I’d salute the author for standing behind the actor and making every word ring true whilst making sure that each diverse strand was so interwoven as to pay off. Given that Birbiglia himself wrote the play, let’s just say that he makes it look extemporaneously natural while dramaturgically it’s anything but. But how are you going to notice when you’re falling off your seats laughing?
The author seems to have been influenced, at least titularly, by Ernest Hemingway’s Pulitzer-winning allegorical rumination The Old Man and the Sea. Birbiglia’s play, on the other hand, is an allegorical rumination for our times. While it’s safe to predict The Old Man & the Pool will not cop the Pulitzer, it is way funnier than Hemingway.
Mike Birbiglia: The Old Man & the Pool opened November 13, 2022, at the Vivian Beaumont Theater and runs through January 15, 2023. Tickets and information: mikebirbigliabroadway.com
