Photo By: Jerome Jakubi
Keckler commands the stage with erotic bravado, launches into dramatic monologues and embodies so many different personae that you can’t help but wonder whether he’s possessed by spirits or if his body cannot help but channel all the of voices in his head. His showmanship is a blend of crooning—with a decidedly androgynous twist—and of performance art. He plays the game of seduction with his audience, but he knows the boundaries of his fictional world as well as the stage. He weaves together stories of love, intimacy, memory and death, all punctuated by his pulsating keyboard.
Mannequinish in a three-piece suit, Keckler seems somewhat wiry on stage until, that is, he belts out in his baritone voice as he skips around octaves and registers. Keckler exhibits his acting chops by switching personae and impersonating characters lying on opposite ends of the histrionics spectrum, from a vapid California broad to an imagined bespectacled teacher of music with a grating voice. “I think there’s something about characters and the desire to escape into them,” Keckler explains, adding, “my show is in the format of a narrator, narrating his own life. He continually slips into all these colorful characters and inhabits them fully, while he remains less defined.”
Keckler has been around the performance art world for the last few years after he moved to New York from Michigan, establishing his reputation by working with the likes of John Moran and Penny Arcade, and this Saturday he’s going to make an early appearance at the Folly benefit, on the same bill with Rufus Wainwright.
For the La MaMa show, his solo New York debut, he presents two pieces for voice and piano, Human Jukebox and Cat Lady, which are both semi-autobiographical.
As Keckler notes, “I like to play with the tension between autobiography and fiction.” In Human Jukebox, he takes the crowd through a motley crew of characters and episodes blown out of proportion.
Human Jukebox opens with a scene of Keckler’s mother playing a guessing game with his father, “the sole patron of the human jukebox.”
Keckler’s detached portrayal of both characters—and his swift reflexes and ability to convince that he’s not merely turning his imagined parents into a caricature for the show—complicate the relationship between what’s real and what’s fictional.
The father goes on naming song titles and Keckler-as-mother never fails to sing the right tune, anything from Benny Mardones’ “Into the Night,” to any song from My Fair Lady, to Puccini’s aria, “Nessun Dorma.”
In Cat Lady, a separate piece, once again, a mother transfigures the banality of everydayness, essentially “alchemizing daily life into art,” by dramatizing a cast of felines in her own personal soap opera.
Keckler, like a “fly on her wall,” observes and rhapsodizes about the mother’s constant preoccupation with the furry protagonists of the drama.The narrator “likens her various creative strategies to those of Warhol, Simone Weil, Magritte and de Sade” and sustains an equal tone of mockery and sophistication throughout this short piece.
Keckler belongs to a tradition of performers who use nuanced humor and dispassionate parody to conceal their own suffering, their absurd and agonizing seriousness regarding their own material.
In this case, Keckler turns deathly serious incidents, like his mother’s battle with a brain aneurysm, into a wistful and tragicomic affair.
Sensual, cathartic, overwrought and deeply philosophical, his psychotic twists and turns can bring his audience either to tears (from laughter) or to a numbed silence. On stage, Keckler paradoxically looms like a fragile doll, but he’s at his game and he plays it well, managing to sync with people’s emotions with natural ease.
> Human Jukebox
Through Mar. 8, La MaMa E.T.C., 74A E. 4th St. (betw. 2nd Ave. & Bowery), 212-475-7710; times vary,
