‘Do you guys remember truth?” Sara Schaefer is over from America to discuss life in the eye of the post-truth, pre-apocalypse, Trumped-up maelstrom. She uses the past to illuminate the present, both publicly (pining for a time when public figures were still susceptible to shame) and privately. Schaefer was raised a zealous Christian, and her nostalgia for moral absolutes is not unrelated, she implies, to her flight from the religious certainties of her youth.
It’s a thoughtful show that becomes a lot more effective, comedy-wise, as it progresses. As Schaefer acknowledges, it starts slowly: “I’m just taking my time. I’m making it this uncomfortable on purpose.” Awkward pauses yawn between jokes; she kills the first big laugh, five minutes in, by letting it lapse into enveloping silence. Later, she apologises, citing jetlag and an anxiety attack the night before. Certainly, she’s a different performer by the halfway mark, when her critique of confrontational, virtue-signalling modern culture begins to coalesce.
The first half has its moments. There’s a heavily sardonic section on the fad for inspirational quotes displayed “on rustic pieces of driftwood in multiple fonts”. Riffs on her experience of “night terrors” and on her lust for TV chef Anthony Bourdain sketch in a picture of a timid but not submissive personality, a mouse with an occasional roar.
But the most potent material comes when Schaefer – once a writer for Late Night With Jimmy Fallon – starts examining our current fetish for the moral high-ground. “Am I a good person or a bad person?” she asks, volunteering the case study of a visit she made to a US craft store with links to the “pro-life” movement. We all commit moral lapses, all the time. But if it’s human to err, it’s hard to divine forgiveness in our call-out culture of social media shaming, say – nor indeed in the Satan-scourging southern Baptism in which Schaefer was raised. To all that, this engaged, undogmatic show – argued with a light touch and some choice comic phrasing – offers a welcome corrective. Even if, tonight, it must navigate a bumpy start before doing so.
- Sara Schaefer: Little White Box is at Soho theatre, London, until 31 March. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
