Alter ego mania

The many faces of Jon McGovern

by Carolyn Clay

ALTER EGOS, Written and performed by Jon McGovern. Presented by Raven Theatrical 1998 Solo Series at the Little Flags Theatre, Friday through Sunday through June 28.

One of the eponymous characters of Jon McGovern's Alter Egos is a sexually repressed math nerd named Jimmy, whose body is taken over by a supercool spirit called the Velvet Hammer. But compared to McGovern's carcass, Jimmy's is so underinhabited he could put out a "Vacancy" sign. For the performer, with no fewer than five wriggling, jiggling dybbuks vying for space in his frame, it must be getting close to no-room-at-the-inn. What's more, McGovern's unlikely ménage is interconnected, proving you can have the proverbial six degrees of separation inside a single eccentric soul.

And don't go selling that soul to the Devil, Jon McGovern, because you are one talented son of a gun -- as well as a pinging, popping assembly line of kooks. I use that terminology because McGovern's unique transformational process hovers between the otherworldly and the industrial: breathless character mantras are interposed with boinging, whooshing noises that suggest R2-D2 scatting like Ella Fitzgerald. As for the Velvet Hammer, he's something of a self-declared piston himself. And the Saturday Night Fever bit in which Jimmy's half of McGovern's perpetual-motion machine tries to hold the Hammer's half down is worth the price of admission.

Which, I am sorry to report, precious few spectators were paying on opening weekend, when being in the Alter Egos audience was a bit like being in a Japanese flower arrangement. What kind of hometown -- or at least home-school -- boosterism is this? McGovern is a 1997 Boston University graduate who began developing this solo turn for BU's New Playwrights Festival, where it was nominated for the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. It went on to a sold-out run at the Duplex in New York and is currently on the bill at Solo Arts Group there. At the spartan Little Flags Theatre, it launches Raven Theatrical's 1998 Summer Solo Series.

McGovern's college experience, as well as an international background, is evident in Alter Egos, which leads off with a super-rich, Arab-trash, American-college student named Zarzuffa, an academic dilettante bent on clubbing and picking up women (Call "1-900-Zarzuffa-I-want-to-be-your-queen"). From there the show moves to the wiltingly folksy Aunt Bertha, whose soul-food establishment is called, in direct defiance of health-and-figure police, the Fat Ass Café. If you have a fat ass, Bertha counsels in a dripping, chortle-ridden patois, you want to suit it up in a G-string and show it off, let the sun and the wind hit it! Unfortunately, Aunt Bertha's eatery has been the victim of a smear campaign by a restaurant specializing in celery, and as she vigorously demonstrates on her own ample thigh, she is itching to slap the anorectic negativists behind it. McGovern doesn't really have an ample thigh, but by the way he demonstrates Bertha's relaxed and heavy hands, you're willing to bet she does.

We also meet head-tossing trailer-park refugee Lerlene, whose aspiration is to become a "supermodel-slash-singer-slash-actress" but whose commitment to practicing for such ancillary occupations as infomercial salesperson and lottery-number announcer is as touching as it is ridiculous. Then there's the Make-Over Guerrilla, who bursts out from behind a counter at the mall to become evangelical, even criminal, in his/her zeal to rid the world of fashion gaffes. These two characters eventually collide, though less conflictedly than Jimmy and the Velvet Hammer, whose war within McGovern's body hilariously demonstrates the performer's broad yet specific physicality.

There are longueurs in Alter Egos: not a lot happens, though the show's quirkish characters and oddball details captivate. Neither is McGovern's material altogether politically correct; the performer is white, and several of his characters wander close to racial stereotype, including the Superflyish Velvet Hammer (of course, the performer also does white and Eurotrash, so what the hell). And the end of the show is a letdown, with McGovern suddenly relaxing into a persona "halfway between Romeo and a real dork" and more or less writing off the evening's bravura display as an attempt to convince some rejecting girlfriend that he's stylish, soulful, and "funnier than you." The performer -- or the character -- is all better, though, having accepted now-TV-talk-show-star Aunt Bertha's advice to "Love Yo' Self!" McGovern's too good to include such banality in his bag of tricks.