New York Times
Friday October 15, 1999
THEATER REVIEW
THOUGH LIFE’S BEEN A PAIN, SHE GETS THE LAST LAUGH
 You’d
think Kathy Buckley was making this stuff up. She was wrongly
labeled retarded as a child, run over by a Jeep while lying
on the beach (pronounced dead by a paramedic who later kept
saying, “I’m so sorry”) and stricken with
cervical cancer, all before she was 30.
And from this she builds a standup-comedy routine.
Apparently these things really happened to Ms. Buckley, who
bills herself as “America’s first hearing impaired
comedienne,” and “Now Hear This!”- her one-woman
show making fun of it all-is a winner. The show, beautifully
directed by Sue Wolf, is at the Lamb’s Theater.
Ms. Buckley, who looks something like Paula Prentiss in her
“Where the Boys Are” days, knows how to win over
an audience fast. Part of her charm is her avowed bitterness.
“I’m not deaf,” she says early in the show.
“I just don’t listen.” In elementary school,
where teachers thought she was “slow,” Ms. Buckley
recalls a report card that assessed her as “poor in
using time profitably.” She quickly adds, “Which,
as we all know, is the cornerstone of second grade.”
She also gets away with murder. Like using the kind of material
that was stale when vaudeville was young. She recalls that
when a manager told her, “You brought the house down,”
she quickly answered, “I didn’t touch anything.”
And she peppers her anecdotes with sentimentality (remembering
a teacher who died, declaring that the most beautiful sound
in the world is a baby laughing) that would be treacle in
most comedy routines.
The rest of the time, she has a devilish sparkle in her eye,
which goes well with her knowing observations: she’s
certain that the reason she didn’t date much as a teen-ager
is that she couldn’t hear the phone ring. When she starts
wearing a hearing aid again as an adult, she goes home and
thinks, God knows how long that toilet’s been running.
If the audience does cut Ms. Buckley some slack because of
her handicap (a word she hates, not surprisingly), she’s
savvy enough to take advantage of that. Too bad she can’t
enjoy some other comedians’ work. As she says, “Robin
Williams’s lips move too fast.”
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NOW HEAR THIS!
Written by and starring Kathy Buckley; directed by Sue Wolf;
sets by Scott Chambliss; lighting by Michael Lincoln; costumes
by Brian DeLapp; sound by Josh Bender-Dubiel; general management,
Martian Entertainment Inc.; production stage manager, Robert
V. Thurber; production management, Back Door Productions inc./Corin
Gutteridge; associate producers, June Curtis and Michael Sterling.
The Tamarind Theater Production presented by Robert Dragotta,
David Hyde Pierce and Scott Hamilton, in association with
Tom Kendall. At the Lamb’s Theater, 130 West 44th Street,
Manhattan.
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