June 16--Ithamar Enriquez may have nothing to say, but this Latino Mr. Bean has a unique niche in the crowded but potentially lucrative arena of viral-digital-cable comedy. He's signed a production deal with comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, who've in turn signed a deal with Maker Studios, a YouTube network producer that aims its content at millennials. Each episode of "Ithamar Enriquez Has Nothing to Say," the Web series, reportedly will last six or seven minutes. Today, that's a desirable, shareable format.
Meanwhile, you can watch a full hour of Enriquez saying nothing in a variety of comedic situations at the Donny's Skybox studio at Second City, where his wordless show bowed Friday night. No Internet connection required.
The live show is a work in progress. Though very talented, he has to be careful not to look like a bad mime. The show does not yet have enough of an arc or a real sense of character for the performer.
The most amusing part of the evening that he occupied was an improvised segment involving (on Friday) an annoyed giraffe in an auto. This Second City alum is a fast thinker and his interest in physical comedy brings a new dimension to this art.
Did you ever see improv done without words, beyond audience suggestions? Probably not. In those moments, he moves the art forward and does something few can do. Similarly amusing is a sequence wherein he performs a variety of movies -- "Jaws," "The Matrix" and so on -- entirely with his fingers, though that stuff has a lot of competition on YouTube. I was less taken with his interpretation of an old man dreaming of the past, mostly because it was insufficiently detailed physically and its emotional key felt fundamentally bathetic.
It strikes me that Enriquez has two ways to go. One is for him to be the physically funny guy -- which can be tricky to pull off since you'd not really call him Chaplinesque. His sense of physical theater is not especially delicate or grounded in wildly detailed observation. Silent or not, he is too much of a personality for that self-effacing approach. He doesn't need to disappear into characters -- he just needs a more powerful one of his own. The other way forward -- and this is where Enriquez really shines and where Rowan Atkinson ("Mr. Bean") can be a useful model -- is to be an everyman figure, a rubber-faced cipher, a wordless reactive presence, a sardonic representative of the audience in a world much too loud for its own good.
You can see glimmers of that in his show, intermittently involving at this point.
Still, I feel weirdly certain someone will read this review in a couple of years, to see how he was going over when nobody knew his name. If he focuses on truth, character and honesty, they surely will. He just has to focus on letting us get to know who he is -- without, of course, ever opening his mouth.
Jones is a Tribune critic.
"Ithamar Has Nothing to Say"
2.5 STARS
When: Through June 20
Where: Donny's Skybox Studio Theatre, 1608 N. Wells St. in Piper's Alley
Running time: 1 hour
Tickets: $20 at 312-337-3992 and http://www.secondcity.com
