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Pride and Soul

nytheatre.com review by Stan Richardson
August 15, 2005

In the basement of their Staten Island apartment, Pride Jones airs her eponymous public access show, assisted by her lover, co-writer and drummer, the monosyllabic Papa Soul. "The Pride Jones Show" is a hodgepodge of live music, d-list celebrity interviews, and reality-TV competitions, and Pride’s dream is to have it aired on Manhattan Cable Access, in addition to Staten Island. In fact, during the hour long “telecast” (the show within the FringeNYC show Pride and Soul), she is waiting anxiously for the cable company to call with a yea or nay.Though promising, Pride and Soul, which was created by its performers Stephanie Marshall (as Pride Jones and others) and Keith “Wild Child” Middleton (as Papa Soul and others), suffers from many of the same problems that plague its fictional counterpart: a wishy-washy identity. The duo clumsily borrow rather than steal (i.e., digest and transform) the conceits and comic techniques of their pop-culture ancestry—from SNL’s “Wayne’s World” to the films of Christopher Guest to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. There is all the attendant making-do of broadcasting from one’s basement; there are the perils of being unable to properly manage one’s image when a camera is recording everything documentary/reality-style; and there is the downtrodden sense of the musician/personality who feels destined for something larger than… Staten Island.The show’s greatest assets right now are the songwriting and performing—fresher and more substantive than most of the other bits (with the possible exception of the televised interview with a neo-Blacksploitation action film diva, which is quite funny). Still there are a number of poor choices and cheap jokes that undercut the audience’s sympathetic response (desperately needed in this kind of show): harassing and hateful phone calls from Pride’s mother and grandmother, signifying nothing useful; some improbable miscommunications between the pair which “result in” some predictable predicaments; and a general (if unspoken) sense that Papa Soul feels trapped and unhappy with Pride, who obviously adores him.Marshall and Middleton are smart and witty actor/writers, but in order for us to care, they must make stronger decisions about the satiric focus of Pride and Soul, and consider lowlighting some of their characters’ failures. Like it or not, in the creation of art, failure is built-in.