Hannah Gadsby Heads Off-Broadway With WOOF! — Review
From the moment Hannah Gadsby steps on stage, the audience at the Abrons Arts Center goes wild. Their fan base is a dedicated one. From the start, each joke is met with roaring laughter and even applause. Gadsby has no problem making an audience feel at ease.
After rocketing to stardom with Nanette, the Netflix special that spawned endless discourse, it’s hard not to be wary of Gadsby, who lured us all in with their whimsy and self-deprecating humor, only to masterfully pull the rug out from under us in ways both hilarious and heartbreaking.
“This isn’t Nanette,” Gadsby assures us early on. And it’s not. However, Nanette looms large. Gadsby bemoans the fact that all of their subsequent work lives in the shadow of that Netflix special, in which they mined their trauma to provide commentary on identity, neurodivergence, and comedy itself.
“This is a show about big questions,” says Gadsby, familiarly impish. Though this often comes on the back of a joke, WOOF! does excavate questions around big ideas like identity, grief, and fame in Gadsby’s one-of-a-kind way, yet it fails to cohere into anything compelling.
It’s true that, in today’s entertainment landscape, content creation is often prioritized over craft. When one has established themselves as a clear brand, it’s advantageous to keep that brand cohesive moving forward. Of course, this can hinder an artist. Why try something new when your audience loved what came before?
While Nanette propelled Gadsby to the world’s stage, it’s not the kind of comedy they want to do anymore. Still, there’s a pressure to deliver that particular brand of trauma-informed comedy their audience has come to expect. It’s a fair gripe, and even understandable, but it’s not material entertaining enough to sustain a show, even if there are moments that work well.
Throughout WOOF!, Gadsby tells the audience they’re “going analog,” meaning they won’t be posting on social media about the personal material in the show and would appreciate it if we let that personal stuff come from them, not us.
Though not always revelatory, what Gadsby shares after these please-don’t-tell caveats make up the major themes of this new show. I’ll do my best to refrain from any spoilers and honor their analog wishes.
In WOOF!’s first half, Gadsby is exactly as you would expect: wry and self-effacing, quick to make themselves the butt of the joke while also throwing pointed barbs at the likes of Taylor Swift and Silicon Valley, even Cabbage Patch dolls. When contemplating the untold amounts of Cabbage Patch Kids piled high in landfills across the globe, Gadsby describes them, as only Hannah Gadsby could, as “some sort of Blair Witch Croquembouche.”
Nanette brought Gadsby unprecedented levels of success and fame, which inevitably brings about wealth. A large part of WOOF! is spent exploring their anxiety around this new tax bracket they’ve found themselves in. As they would put it: they went from cleaning motels to staying in “posh hotels.” Gadsby is skilled enough to keep this material funny, but it will always be eye roll-inducing, not to mention tone deaf, to complain about the existential crisis caused by getting richer. It’s a “problem” most people can’t relate to.
Gadsby’s gift for comedic storytelling is undeniable, and it’s clear they’re comfortable in the hands of director Jenney Shamash, who has produced all of Gadsby’s work since 2019. But once the joke-telling and the hilarious stories end—I’m thinking particularly of an unforgettable anecdote involving a package of Tim Tams—the rest of the show falls apart under scrutiny.
Shamash and Gadsby have clearly spent time thinking about the audience’s reaction to this material. Just as I was sitting there thinking that most of their cultural references were outdated, Gadsby made the same point and justified their use of it. Still, the payoff isn’t satisfying enough to alter the fact that the audience must sit through material that would’ve felt fresh last year.
Oona Curley’s production design, based on original designs by Shamash, is pleasantly simple yet used effectively to underscore Gadsby’s storytelling.
Gadsby’s voice is singular and a welcome one in today’s comedy scene. Their particular blend of humor and cultural commentary elevates the form and takes it in a new direction, which makes it all the more difficult when WOOF! doesn’t quite rise to the level we’ve come to expect.
WOOF! runs through October 27 at the Abrons Arts Center. For tickets and more information, visit here.