Former child star is hilariously jaded
Mary Beth Barone: Silly Little Girl Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33), until 28 August
Comedy was never part of Mary Beth Barone’s plan. But her grandmother had a premonition. And as she’s more open to astrology than the Catholicism she was nominally raised in, who’s to say where her destiny lay? Cold-eyed, unsmiling and deadpan to the point of emotional blankness, the Stepford Wives allusion of her publicity images well-earned, references to ex-best friends piling up like cadavers, the American is a detached, ironic narrator of her eccentric adolescence.
Raised in a loving, encouraging family, more’s the pity for her memoir, she nevertheless had a precocious appetite for performance and celebrity that perhaps shouldn’t have been quite so encouraged. Manipulated footage from her school talent show reflects the cynicism she now applies to her youthful dreams. And her 10-year-old’s poem about 9/11 remains memorable for all the wrong reasons. But photos of her home modelling shoots and portfolio snaps from a modelling school are both humanising of her and disturbingly sexualised, first a child recreating the poses she saw in magazines, then a 15-year-old made-up and inappropriately styled in swimwear and other outfits. Barone makes no explicit link between these experiences and her subsequent body dysmorphia, stand-up vocation and brutally dark sense of humour. But it couldn’t be more heavily implied.
Though bisexually open and avowedly sex positive, or “totally sex pozzie” as she puts it in her aloof opening remarks, it’s probably fair to say that Barone is jaded about relationships, both from her plug for her hit show Drag His Ass, about “overcoming fuckboy addiction”, also playing at the festival, and her worldly wise, sardonic views on modern hook-ups.
One defining routine about why guys and girls shouldn’t date because of their differing conversational motivations is both brilliantly persuasive and a signature bit, Barone distilled to her prematurely pessimistic, satiated essence. Happily for audiences, the fact that she’s now seeing a Brit means we should be seeing more of her.