Like a Dog on Linoleum

Solo performances often teeter on the uncomfortable edge between tiresome personal confessional and manic multiple personality disorder, but Leslie Jordan transcends the genre by bringing a performance to the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre that is hysterical, poignant, and, dare I say, endlessly entertaining. If David Sedaris and Tennessee Williams sat down to write a play, it would be Jordan's life as he fashions it. Linoleum presents the veteran character actor and Will & Gracestar seamlessly weaving tales from his childhood in Tennessee, where he twirled his baton on the front lawn ("I was the gayest man I knew"); his lifelong love affairs with bad boys and narcotics ("I'm so grateful to drugs and alcohol — I wouldn't have made it through adolescence without them"); and on into his long career in Hollywood ("I arrived with 200 bucks sewn in my underpants"). The storytelling is effortless, especially as Jordan slips in and out of the characters of various Southern eccentrics. "We don't put crazy people away in the South," he says. "We put them on the porch so everyone can enjoy them." Even as Jordan gets more introspective toward the end, touching on addiction and friends lost to AIDS, he never loses the joyous playfulness of telling a wonderful yarn.