Josh Sharp hosts an evening of reminiscences abetted by deft comic wordplay in ta-da! at the Greenwich House Theater.
In his solo show ta-da!, Josh Sharp draws on his immense charm and deft wit to navigate subjects that are far weightier than his upbeat title implies. They include pedophilia, cancer, gay-bashings of varying intensity, and a near-death experience. He does it while holding a clicker that initially projects everything he says on a screen behind him precisely: “Hi. Hello. What’s up. How are you? Hi. Hello. Hi. Welcome.” His diction is crisp and clear, so there’s really no need for the screen, except as a display of physical stamina and memory, and a source of visual variety. Eventually, though, under Sam Pinkleton’s direction, Sharp’s script and the screen projections diverge amusingly to add a layer of comic counterpoint—a practice that reaches back to Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? in 1966.
For those unaware of his background, Sharp starts out with his childhood: he grew up with an interest in magic, at which he wasn’t very good. At 8 years old, he’d dress up and enter a room and announce, “Ta-da!”—“so, you know,” he says as (ta-da!) on the projection becomes interchangeable with gay. It was an early clue to his sexual orientation, but it didn’t make accepting himself any easier:
Sharp uses a slide clicker to move through 2,000 slides during his presentation.
I grew up
in the south
Like in the rural south.
So I didn’t want to be
(ta-da)
Down there
The screen projections also incorporate many social media abbreviations used by Gen Z: fr is for real; p is pretty; and slay is to do something exceptionally well (the big slay is a favorite phrase of Sharp’s). Much of the material about his growing up—masturbation, losing virginity, the relationships with friends, his life in New York—is bawdy and sometimes tawdry, but sprinkled with naïveté and presented with a fresh-faced innocence.
Throughout his musings about Turkish baths, bargaining with God to help him escape his homosexuality, and his mother’s cancer diagnosis that involved a mistake in her treatment that proved positive, or incidental references to having worked as an SAT tutor, he maintains a bright, unthreatening demeanor that allows one to entrust the evening to his guidance, even when it skirts good taste.
Sharp greets the audience with an extended “Hiiiiiii!,” which is projected on a screen behind him as he says it.
Contrasting a Turkish bath with a sauna, he says:
A sauna, conceptually speaking, is a series of increasingly inhospitable rooms. And the proper usage is to sit in them perfectly still until you’re as close as you can get to dying without actually dying.
He has three encounters with “gay-bashing,” none of them involving physical violence or bloodshed. But, he concedes, being a white male gives him a pass:
I’m swimming in privilege. I’m drowning in the stuff. For me, sometimes being gay … just feels like a hall pass.
The meat of his show involves two life-changing events: his mother’s cancer treatments and his own near-death experience.
His mother, after a cancer diagnosis and acceptance into trials for a new drug, attempted to “bully” him out of the closet. In her journal he found a comment of hers about another friend who was gay, one whose parents shunned him. In Sharp’s telling,
When my mother heard about that part, about how his family reacted, she was like: I just can’t imagine doing that. Choosing to ignore something so important about my child. You know, where I’m at right now, I really just need to know everything. Even the things you’re not sure if I should know. Trust that I want to know. I want to know it all. So it’s better that we talk about it then we don’t. Because we don’t know how much time I have left. … Imagine the deep regret you’d feel if I passed away.
But, in the journal, she adds: “Being gay. I feel like that’s something people are doing more of now.”
Sharp’s own encounter with mortality came on a beach in the popular gay resort town of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, when he was hit by a huge wave and lost consciousness for 40 minutes, waking to find a Canadian woman had pulled him out of the ocean and was trying to coax information from him. The episode segues amusingly into a discussion of quantum immortality theory and, specifically, Erwin Schrödinger’s cat, which in theory can be both alive and dead at the same time. But whether Sharp’s stories are intellectual or erotic, they have an overarching theme: Carpe diem.
“Being alive,” he says, “is big slay after all. The biggest slay, really.”
Josh Sharp’s ta-da! runs through Sept. 11 at the Greenwich House Theater (27 Barrow St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Monday through Friday and at 5 and 8 p.m. Saturday. For tickets and more information, visit joshsharptada.com.
Playwright: Josh Sharp
Director: Sam Pnkleton
Scenic designer: Meredith Ries
Lighting Designer: Cha See
Co-video designer: Stivo Arnoczy
