The Barry Years

<p><b><q>Rich in swagger, invention, mischief and heat…the crispness and bite of Barbagallo's text is, recursively, a love letter to writing itself.</q> — <i>Time Out NY</i></b></p> <p><i>The Barry Years</i> includes three plays from writer-director-performer Jess Barbagallo, who has shaped an entire generation of New York theater with his tender haywire wit. <i>My Old Man and Other Stories</i> follows Barry—a forlorn Tom Waits impersonator with a water-stained floor and romance-induced insomnia—through a sequence of episodic scenes featuring emotional incompetents seeking love without compromise. An homage to small-town decay and reduced expectations, <i>My Old Man and Other Stories</i> is at once lambent with unrequited longing and crisp as the mechanics of life. Barry returns in <i>Weekend at Barry’s/Lesbian Lighthouse</i>, a pair of back-to-back episodes of television-as-theater, the second knocked-off from (knocked up by?) the first. Now a forty-something cultural worker whose career-averse lifestyle has led him to a personal and professional dead end, Barry bounces between questionable jobs and even more questionable lovers. In language that is <q>winking, layered, [and] dazzling</q> (Helen Shaw, <i>Vulture</i>), Barbagallo delivers a devastatingly precise and zany send-up of the contemporary art world that teeters on that silver highwire between despair and hilarity. <i>Weekend at Barry's: Greatest Hits</i>—featuring Barry but narrated by Biv, your resident narrator, dreamer, and shit-starter—is kind of like a spin-off. And also a bunch of short stories. Anyway, it asks us to <q>reexamine our formalities,</q> in Biv's words. <q>Learning to love in this way is a form of radicalism because it means that perverse love—that is the love we do against the structures that seek to organize us in brutality—is the only love.</q> </p>