Piping Hot

Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
The Yard Theatre
Closed 

RECOMMENDED

Comedian Madeline Hamilton’s 60-minute lecture-confessional on how to play the bagpipes, told in conjunction with her stories from her desperate, desolate love life, is an idiosyncratic, racy homage to Scotland’s national musical instrument.

Hamilton is tailoring the piece for its premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and this LA preview was a warm-up for that, and — for the record — not part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival, which is being performed concurrently.

Short story shorter, Hamilton presents herself as doggedly hetero and persistently disappointed by men (in the US and Scotland) who either pretended to be caring and then walked out or didn’t even pretend. (One Scottish lover literally couldn’t face her during sex, and used her as a kind of emotional punching bag to take out his anger at being dumped by his ex, a similarly shaped blonde, similarly named Madeleine. (They met on the Internet, so he knew her name and her look.)

A svelte, athletic woman on a stage adorned with just a music stand, Hamilton arrives dressed in a black halter top, a tartan skirt and goth boots. She’s wielding a set of bagpipes. Hamilton is as American as Texas, where she’s from, and where, she says, she grew up in a conservative, religious community that preached the evils of masturbation, a restraint that postponed at least one level of satisfaction. In terms of self-esteem, her beauty was described in her high school yearbook as “understated.” This was probably intended as a compliment, she opines, but didn’t come out that way. While attending USC, she hooked up, in all meanings of that phrase, including the latch, with a fellow who introduced her to USC’s comedy club and TV station. Yes, that conjugal relationship went belly up, perhaps because of a culturally imbibed need for loyalty and monogamy.

During a semester abroad in Edinburgh, she decided, as a joke, to learn how to play the bagpipes, a joke that turned into her obsession.

After years of rejection by men, she now considers the bagpipes her lover — five penises connected to a scrotum. There’s a chanter, three drones and, yes, a blow pipe. It doesn’t take much of a stretch to know where this is going.

Unable to let go of this obsession, she plays her bagpipes on the beach, on the streets, gets screamed at by passers-by for being “ugly” and “out of tune.” She gets insulted online for being an American out of her depth with a foreign cultural relic. Hamilton makes no claim to being a bagpipe prodigy. It’s a very difficult instrument, and she’s learning. Still, her onstage demonstration is perfectly competent, and very loud.

Her delightful performance, amiable, funny and self-deprecating, invites the question of why men keep abandoning her. Is this a quality of hetero men in the 2020s? If it’s something about her, I couldn’t see it. Is there something she’s not telling us? Not showing us?

She describes herself growing up as obsessively competitive, racing to her goals like a Quarter-Horse. Among those goals is partnership with a male, a goal as yet, unfulfilled.

The beauty of this performance, under Michelle Askew’s spirited direction, is the epiphany that learning to play the bagpipes takes patience and skill. But it starts with patience. Calm. And it’s a long, fulfilling process. A metaphor, anybody?

The Lark Theatre, 4319 Melrose Ave., East Hollywood. Closed.