Natalie Palamides has a habit of standing out: whether it’s as the perpetually eye-rolling Mara in commercials for Progressive insurance or as the voice of various animated characters, like Buttercup in the reboot of “The Powerpuff Girls” or young Esther in the new Netflix series “Haunted Hotel.”
Part of what makes her so distinct is a vocal delivery that evokes Aubrey Plaza’s sardonic edge and Natasha Lyonne’s low-pitched rasp, teetering on the edge of enthusiasm, innocence and terminal disdain. It’s also partly because of her deft acting skills and ability to quickly pivot, which is essential for animation. In a video interview, Matt Roller, the creator of “Haunted Hotel,” called her “a Rolodex of emotions.”
Palamides takes that success modestly. “It just feels like, how am I so lucky that I get to make money doing weird voices, which is what I’ve done since I was a kid,” she told me during an interview earlier this month.
Like so many things involving Palamides, however, this preamble has been a bit of misdirection: Because it’s her stage shows that are really her clowning glory. Hilarious, subversive, mind-scrambling and sneakily emotional, these productions are both precisely engineered and riotously unhinged. And Palamides never fails to throw herself into the most outré bits.
Now, Palamides, 35, a writer and performer based in Los Angeles, has landed her most high-profile New York gig to date: the local premiere of her 2024 show, “Weer,” is the first long run at the renovated Cherry Lane Theater (an Off Broadway venue now owned by A24, the hip studio behind “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Hereditary” and “Moonlight”). In a testimony to her growing reputation, the show was extended before previews even started; now its run, through Nov. 9, is sold out.
A homage of sorts to romantic comedy, which Palamides says is her favorite movie genre, “Weer” opens with a couple, Mark and Christina, fighting on New Year’s Eve 1999. Before long, the story flashes back three years to their meet-cute and the birth of their relationship.
Palamides ups the stylistic ante by playing both characters, with her costume and makeup split down the middle from head to toes, like the Batman villain Two-Face. Half of her body is the mustachioed Mark, who starts off wearing cargo pants and a flannel shirt, while the other side is Christina, in a pink top, low-cut jeans and foofy 1990s hair.
Naturally, there is a sex scene.
It certainly sounds wild, and it is. But “Weer” is a stylistic, tonal and conceptual continuation of Palamides’s previous production, “Nate: A One Man Show,” which was filmed for a Netflix special released in 2020. (Writing about the live version, Jason Zinoman described it as “a startlingly unusual creation” in The New York Times.)
In it she plays the title character, another mustachioed bro in a flannel shacket open to reveal a mat of chest hair, and the show confronts masculinity and consent head-on. Nate, for example, is prone to approaching theatergoers, hovering his hands near their breasts or crotch, and politely asking, “May I?” The crux of the narrative is a fraught encounter with his art teacher, Miss Jackson (a store mannequin manipulated by Palamides like a life-size puppet), that ends in discomforting fashion.
“I love having moments where people are laughing super-hard one second and then you pull out the rug, whether it’s shocking them or scaring them or making them feel a little bit sad or emotional or enamored,” Palamides said. “There’s so many different ways you can oscillate between big laughs and pure emotions.”
Following suit, “Weer” is a comedy rooted in tragedy: “I really wanted to do a violent car crash,” Palamides said. She remembered “Last Kiss,” a 1960s song that was popularized by Pearl Jam in the late ’90s and which her aunt used to play a lot. “I just loved the images in it of him holding his love on the ground as she’s bleeding out,” Palamides added.
This constant seesawing between laughter and pathos is a major part of clowning, the art form that Palamides holds in such high regard she thinks she’s not worthy of the label yet. “I have maybe a little impostor syndrome,” she said. “Everybody else calls me a clown, and I want to be a clown.”
That vocation started early for Palamides, who grew up in Pittsburgh. She described how in middle school, the other kids would stop her in the hallways and ask her to do different characters. But that budding expertise did not quite translate to a clown class she took at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Seeing her floundering, her professor, Rick Kemp, gave her a warning. “He was like, ‘If you’re not able to be vulnerable and open up, you’re going to fail clown,’” Palamides said. “Which is ironic because the whole purpose of clown is to embrace failure. If I had failed clown, that would be a win, right? But I worked really hard on bringing down my walls and in the end I did end up getting that A.”
When the Philadelphia theater company Pig Iron did a residency at her college, she further explored theater’s ability to create galleries of characters. She ended up working on Pig Iron’s production of “I Promised Myself to Live Faster,” a play based on the life and work of the New York writer and performer Charles Ludlam.
“That’s really where I discovered my joy in doing drag,” Palamides said. “During that workshop they had all of us doing characters as the opposite sex, because that’s what Charles Ludlam did. We were exploring this line he walked of camp and also being able to pull at people’s heartstrings.”
Still, she did not stay with Pig Iron and after graduation she followed her partner to Los Angeles, where Palamides started picking up animation work and, more critically, enrolled in John Gilkey’s class the Idiot Workshop, which she considers ground zero for Los Angeles’s thriving alt-clown scene.
An integral part of Palamides’s clowning is her interaction with the audience. She develops her shows through public improvisations and is a master at gauging people’s reactions and incorporating them into her idiosyncratic world (in her first show, “Laid,” she portrayed a woman who lays an egg every day, then must decide whether to eat it or nurture it).
She does not use a script, and though she’s verbally and physically meticulous as a performer, she does not rehearse, at least not in the traditional way. “It’s so much to put yourself through for nobody,” she said. Indeed. At the end of her shows, the stage looks as if a tornado hit it, with props, debris and fluids strewn about.
“It’s so fun to watch her put herself in an impossible situation as a performer, like truly making the stage really dangerous for herself, and then figuring it out anyway,” Courtney Pauroso, a clown and comedian, said on the phone. (The two women collaborated on the series “The Broadcast,” which is looking for a streaming home.)
“I love shocking people,” Palamides admitted, “and maybe that’s cheap, like, I always feel like a hack comedian because a lot of the stuff I do, like getting naked or blowing fire, wrestling people, is just shock value.”
This felt like a pro forma disclaimer from someone whose shows have trenchant perspectives on gender, for example, and are exacting about the mechanics of laughter.
Early in our conversation at Wild Cherry, the restaurant at Cherry Lane, Palamides demonstrated how she fine-tunes her physical comedy by breaking down a brief moment when Mark puts his hand on Christina’s arm as she tries to leave. One way to act it gets a laugh, she explained while performing a series of tiny variations, and others just don’t. “Sometimes there’s these little micro-movements that do make a difference — it’s really specific,” she said. Another longtime collaborator, Bill O’Neill, experienced Palamides’s perfectionism when she directed his show “The Amazing Banana Brothers.” In a phone interview, he recalled what happened after he agreed to let her give notes in front of an audience: “She chimed in almost immediately and said, ‘We don’t really believe you — why don’t you come out and try another entrance?’
“The next hour was me doing maybe 30 different entrances,” he continued. “Also I was falling on a lot of banana peels in the show and she was picking them up off the stage and throwing them at me, going ‘Faster! Faster!’”
He didn’t hold it against her. Now he’s playing one of the pink-lingerie-clad assistants n “Lady Magic,” a takedown of blowhard magicians that Palamides conceived and directed with a Las Vegas residency in mind. The show, which had a workshop run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August, is being developed with Spiegelworld, the live-entertainment company behind spectacles like “Absinthe” and “Discoshow.”))
“Lady Magic” features many Palamides trademarks, including the manhandling of a soft rubber penis, but is further complicated by her insistence on incorporating actual tricks. “Everybody started making fun of me because I would just say it needs to be more magical,” she said.
For Palamides, constant experimentation and limit-testing are part of the process. This was on full display in a surreal episode of the Apple TV+ series “Gutsy.” The focus was on comedy and paired Palamides, Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton and the veteran French clown Philippe Gaulier. During their time together, Chelsea Clinton even lets Palamides grope her breasts in a re-enactment of the “May I?” scene from “Nate.”
You never know, after all, what’s going to work until you try it.
“In some places there’s room for play, and always room for failure,” Palamides said, philosophically. “That’s the spirit of the clown.”
The post This Subversive Comedian’s Stage Shows Are Her Clowning Glory appeared first on New York Times.
