Quinn is very anti-PC in ‘Story’
THE NEW YORK STORY Starring Colin Quinn Cherry Lane Theatre
NEWYORK In his one-man show The New York Story, comedian Colin Quinn looks at where his native city has been and where it’s going. And frankly, he’s a little concerned.
“There are no characters left now,” Quinn, a proud son of Brooklyn, observes in an accent as thick as a pastrami sandwich. “People are very cautious. All of the New York characters are qualifying everything they say. That’s why you don’t have the New York personality.”
But as Story progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the issues Quinn is addressing aren’t merely local. Directed by Jerry Seinfeld, the show ostensibly offers an irreverent trip through the city’s history — just as Quinn’s 2010 Broadway outing Long Story
Short, also helmed by Seinfeld, zipped through the history of the world in 75 minutes, also this
Story’s run time. Quinn, who also wrote the off-Broadway show, begins by acknowledging, briefly, the Native Americans who first trod our soil. He proceeds to send up other groups, in roughly chronological order of their arrival, more colorfully. The Dutch, English, Germans, Jews, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Koreans and others all receive good-natured jabs.
The Irish, Quinn’s tribe, have always been the only “real Catholics,” he quips: “We walk out of the church like we walk out of a bar — hunched over and just stunned.” He also remembers fondly the impertinence of his black classmates while acknowledging that their ancestors arrived in this country under less than ideal circumstances.
As Quinn’s observations shift to recollections of his youth and more recent experiences, and the contrast between them, his real target emerges. It is political correctness, which in Quinn’s view has been empowered — to use one of several overemployed terms he mocks here — in the Information Age.
He envisions a car accident in which one driver is Asian; a punch is thrown and a racially insensitive remark is made. The online community, in its “great wisdom,” Quinn cracks, is “disturbed” — not by the accident or the punch but by the remark, which is declared “symptomatic of a culture of exclusion that allows this mindset to flourish.” It presents, the community decides, an “opportunity to re-examine our prejudices.”
Quinn delivers these lines (more or less, as one doesn’t expect him to stick strictly to the text each night) in a breathless rush, so that while individual words may get lost, the vibe doesn’t. (Seinfeld clearly didn’t advise him to slow down or focus on enunciation.) He’s selling himself, primarily, on regular-guy chutzpah. Hey, he asks the audience, don’t we all feel a little paranoid these days? Haven’t we all found the patronizing self-righteousness of certain self-appointed pundits a little ridiculous, or even offensive?
These aren’t original questions, and of course, answers will vary. In the end, the show works best as breezy entertainment — a
Story told with earthy charm and, naturally, with a little bit of attitude.