When Billy Crudup played opposite Natalie Portman in the movie Jackie, as a reporter interviewing Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of her husband’s assassination, you saw the actor as he looks in most of his films, a handsome Clark Kent type. The extraordinary feat of Harry Clarke, his one-man show at the Minetta Lane Theater, is the ease with which we lose the actor for Harry Clarke, the inner extrovert of his character Philip Brugglestein. Talk about identity fluidity.

An invented person with a British accent, Clarke popped out of the person of Philip from the Midwest, and when he is present, Harry makes Philip a person he never was, bold, brash, and British, without ever having been to England. In David Cale’s play, directed by Leigh Silverman, Crudup makes you question the morality of self-reinvention.  This is a gem of a performance in 80-minutes on a bare stage but for a chair that converts to an apartment, a yacht in Rhode Island, a GAP in your mind’s eye. In this time of fakeries of all sorts, Billy Crudup sells you a bill of goods. Like all the characters he meets as Harry, it is Harry you are happy to buy.

Regina Weinreich

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