Chris Parker has become a character in himself for Auckland audiences. He straddles the theatre and comedy scenes effortlessly and commits to characters and scenes like a newlywed, with both feet jumping in the deep end. Whether he’s performing weekly in Snort, or as a hapless cruise patron in Hauraki Horror or performing with Hayley Sproull in their comedy festival shows, Parker has made a name for himself as a tremendously talented and singular performer.

Last year I decided on a whim to go to a scratch night, a night where artists try out new characters or shows, at The Basement. Parker came out in a dress and proceeded to tell a story about being told off for dancing in the good room. Not too bizarre as scratch nights go, but what was most remarkable about this was not Parker’s performance, and Parker has the feline physicality and vocal dexterity to make anything not only funny but funny in ways that recall John Waters films in the 80s, but how respectful he was of this ‘character’. The comedy didn’t come from the fact it was a man wearing a dress, an easy go-to for lazy comedians, the comedy came from Parker’s painfully honest retelling of a story that is as banal in its normality as it is absurd.

This story forms the basis for No More Dancing in the Good Room, a forty minute retelling of this story, and the surrounding events, leading up to him coming out to his family. Parker brings the same respect to this as he did to that five-minute excerpt, with utter respect to the character and the story that they’re telling; which in this case happens to just be a younger version of himself.

It’s told in stream of consciousness, which reduces the amount of commentary that Parker as a performer can have on the show, instead the show’s structure has to convey the meaning and depth behind it. When it’s dead in the middle of the Comedy Festival, it takes a little bit of time to recalibrate to this kind of storytelling, when the laughs come it’s less because they’re telegraphed and more because the show is provoking something in you. You can feel some people in the audience tensing up or being unwilling to laugh at some moments, and these same people cracking up at times when others tense up. It’s a beautiful thing to provoke laughter, but an even more beautiful thing to provoke laughter out of something deep and perhaps covered up within an audience member.

You can feel director Jo Randerson’s style on the piece, from this storytelling style to the repetition of phrases, both physical and verbal. Parker’s command of both of these is commendable – where other performers might see a dance interlude be just that, Parker makes it the soul of the show. He commits to the dance, and the show is more truthful, and therefore more funny, because of it.

It’s less a stand-up show or even your average solo show than it a piece of performance art; one where meaning is less imported on an audience than it is brought out of it. There are sequences throughout where the meaning of the show is clear, and both Parker and Randerson are clever never to overstate subtext at the cost of the actual text.

The concept of the ‘good room’ is one that’s easy to derive meaning from; the phrase itself brings up connotations of a forbidden place, one that’s off limits to a person. The show tears into the concept of ‘camp’ in a deceptive way; it’s hilarious, but there is an anger and a sadness to the show that bubbles beneath the comedy. It comes up in that beautiful ending, a truly gorgeous acceptance of character, past and retroactive trauma that is as perfect an example of catharsis as any.

No More Dancing In The Good Room in this form feels like a show learning how to walk. Parker is playing around with the vocabulary to tell this story, not just in terms of the verbal storytelling, like stream of consciousness and repetitions of certain phrases. There’s room within this piece and this story to explore into different kinds of theatrical storytelling that dig deeper into the ‘good room’ and the implications of there being a good room in a person’s life.

No More Dancing in the Good Room is a emotionally and comedically satisfying forty minutes, and it’s hard to imagine a show that exists at the polar opposites of delightful and troubling as comfortably and confidently as this show does. But it can do more, it can be more and it can dig deeper. I can’t wait for it, and Parker to do that.

No More Dancing In The Good Room plays at The Basement Studio from
5 - 9 May See also:
Greg Bruce for Metro Magazine