Learning Curves
Jake Lipman doesn’t spare her younger self in Learning Curves and that honesty is what makes it work. In this autobiographical one-woman show Lipman revisits the Boston public school where she grew up just before it’s torn down and lets the audience watch her grow up all over again.
The first half of the performance is her sharpest. Compared to the film Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, for Margaret and her friends bras and first periods are almost a club everyone is waiting to join. For Lipman they make her a target. Her account of getting her first period on a sixth-grade trip wrapped in toilet paper as classmates gawk is definitely a standout. She turns the cruelty of middle school into comedy without losing sight of how much it hurt.
Lipman is just as skilled at playing other people. She shifts easily between her worldly Russian best friend, her crusading mother and the science teacher whose jokes turn predatory. Each character is slightly exaggerated and the theatricality suits a story told through the eyes of a girl who saw everything as bigger than life. The mood darkens when she reaches high school where the audience witnesses the transition by a jean jacket pulled over her shirt, although it is unclear if this is purposeful or not but it works.
Learning Curves moves from first periods to first sexual experiences and into abuse that touched her friends and her own family. Lipman handles it with care but the second half packs in so much that some moments deserve more room to breathe. Still, the ending earns its emotion.
Back at the reunion she pulls an old classmate onto the auditorium’s low stage and sings the school anthem she once marched around reciting “Pierce is for people who help each other out.” It is like she is back where she has started her musical theatrics taking over the auditorium, from when the audience met her at 13 years old witnessing her go through puberty and all the other things life had thrown at her, and all in between.
Learning Curves turns a painful girlhood into a funny and moving solo show.
Learning Curves
Starring Jake Lipman
Performed on October 28
Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd St, in Manhattan
Reviewer: Hailey Fulmer
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