To be funny, sometimes you have to take yourself too seriously. To find humor, sometimes you have to look at the dark side of life.
"Comedy is tragedy revisited," said Jamie M. Fox, quoting the comedian Phyllis Diller.
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Actor Jamie Fox
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That's the heart of Fox's one-woman play, "inDEPENDENCE," about a family trying to understand a brother and a son's addiction. It opens tonight with a 7 p.m. show at Bunnell Street Gallery and plays through Sunday. Fox and director Jeff Weatherford also conduct an acting workshop for adults and teenagers from 10 a.m-3 p.m. Friday.
Moving from tragedy to comedy also is the arc of Fox's creative path. A 2000 graduate of Florida State University's theater program, she studied in London with Theatre de Complicite. Her image dark haired, somber looking got her cast in dramatic roles.
"It was in London I realized I was funny," Fox said in a telephone interview last week from her Los Angeles home. "I took everything so seriously, and people were laughing at me."
Fox turned to improvisational comedy, and dove into the improv scene, performing with Second City, Improv Olympic and The Comedy Central Stage. Fox has had small roles in commercials and independent films, including "Employee of the Month" (not the version with Jessica Simpson, but the version with Matt Dillon, Steve Zahn and Christina Applegate).
Improv showed her another side of her acting ability, and taught her another way to tell a story. A lousy speller, she had been reluctant to write. That didn't matter in improv.
"Improv gave me the freedom not to judge myself and realize I could tell a story," Fox said.
In modern theater, the one- or two-actor, multi-character play has become something of a phenomena. Bunnell has brought two such works to Homer this season: Leilani Chan and Ova Saopeng's "Refugee Nation" and Kathryn Blume's "The Boycott." Fox cited popular plays by comedian-actors like Whoopi Goldberg and Lilly Tomlin, but said she was most inspired by Anna Deavere Smith's "Fires in the Mirror," about the Crown Heights, N.Y., riots between Hasidic Jews and African Americans in the 1990s. In "Fires in the Mirror," Smith portrays numerous characters, everything from a black woman to a Hassidic Jew.
"To me, that was the ultimate way to tell a story," Fox said. "I knew that was what I wanted to do."
Fox grew up in a suburb outside of Columbus, Ohio. Her father was director of the local Jewish community center, and her mother was a teacher. One day her brother got arrested on drug charges.
"Here's this man (her father) who's well known in the community, and connected to a lot of people, but they didn't know where to turn," she said.
Jews don't talk about addiction in all its forms, such as drug abuse, alcoholism or eating disorders, Fox said. Out of that incident came "inDEPENDENCE." But it's not the addict's story, she said. She wrote a monologue by the addict the brother and son but dropped it from the final draft.
"You never meet the brother," Fox said. "Here's this presence that's affecting everyone's life and he's never even around. This is about how addiction affects the family dynamics v. the addict's story."
Bunnell Street Gallery connected with Fox not through the usual process of booking agencies, but through a chance meeting between Fox and gallery board member Rika Mouw in Seattle. Mouw said she and her husband John were standing in line for lunch and struck up a conversation with the woman in front of them Fox. Fox was in Seattle doing a performance of "inDEPENDENCE." The Mouws had lunch with Fox. By the end of lunch, Rika Mouw decided Fox's play would be perfect for Homer and later convinced gallery director Asia Freeman and the board to book her act.
"She's this delightful person we just had a rapport with," Rika Mouw said. "She is such a classy, articulate, lovely person, we knew she was a winner."
Freeman said she thought "inDEPENDENCE" would appeal to young adult audiences. The subplot of a character working in a dead-end job as a celebrity assistant and the story of a brother struggling with addiction would resonate with teenagers making similar life choices.
"This seems to me a great age to open up discussion on the therapeutic role of art and self-expression," Freeman said.
Freeman would have liked to have brought Fox's show to the schools, but the timing didn't work out, she said. To encourage teenagers to attend, Bunnell Gallery offers all performances free to teenagers.
"inDEPENDENCE" also is about learning eventually from one's mistakes.
"It's how we repeat the same things over and over again until we get it," Fox said.
And funny, too, despite its painful subject matter, Fox said.
"There's a tremendous amount of pain in the show and a tremendous amount of sadness," she said. "But there's humor."
For more information on Fox, visit her Web page atwww.jamiemfox.com.
Michael Armstrong can be reached at michael.armstrong@homernews.com.
