On August 17, 2000, Piero Procaccini flopped. He had scored a slot in Improv-Olympic’s Slugfest series of solo performances, and he was excited about his piece–a serious and, he felt, moving exploration of life after death. Because he figured that everything goes black when you die, he decided to perform the show with the lights off. He stood still in the dark while prerecorded monologues he’d performed in the character of various people speaking from beyond the grave played.
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A year later he mined that experience for laughs in another Slugfest show, The Worst Performance Ever, but since then he’s shied away from solo performance, favoring ensemble acting and directing. One Man Show is his attempt to revive his solo career, and it’s exactly what the title suggests: Procaccini wrote and directed the piece, handles the sound, and takes your ticket at the door. He’s doing the lights too, but this time he’s leaving them on.
In the spring of 2004 he directed his first sketch show with a group called the Applicants, then won a slot in a directing program at Second City, where he taught classes and worked as an assistant director with the touring company. That experience helped him land a gig as an assistant to the director, Sue Gillan, for a Second City E.T.C. show, From Fear to Eternity.
That meant doing another one-man show. He had been thinking about how one-man shows are rarely as solitary as the name suggests–usually a few supporting actors assist the central performer. “So then, of course, I started thinking…what if it’s not just one guy onstage but it’s completely, really, truly a one-man show,” he says. “One guy writes it, performs it, directs it, does his own lighting, does his own sound, and produces it. And that idea made me laugh, so I decided I definitely wanted to try it. It’s also kind of a scary thing to do. It was one of the most challenging ideas that I came up with, so I wanted to see if it was possible.”
When: Fri 11/25, 9 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Flynn.
