Massive balloons for her bum and boobs, and nipples that look like they’d have your eye out: Maya Ricote is a larger-than-life, cryogenically frozen, cellulite-free, 25-year-old telenovela actress. A clown. She emerges from a freezer, having last seen the light of day in 1930, and sets about trying to secure an acting job. Will she be a star? Or will she be a normal, uninteresting, un-famous person? Just like us! The plot of the hour-long piece really doesn’t have anything more to it than that. A woman, a phone and a contract.
Clown shows don’t necessarily need much of a narrative beyond a sustained commitment to silliness, but Ay Am! occasionally feels repetitive and thin. There is plenty of overdramatised sighing, posing and repeated references to her “body”, all of which raises a laugh, but it begins to feel a little drawn out. This is not to say that the premise and comic building blocks of the show are not firmly in place, just that a denser clowning routine and higher gag rate would really pump it up even more.
Much of the clowning centres on the fundamental strangeness of acting. Ricote rushes to put on and remove a cap as she switches between playing cab driver Tony and herself, looking almost like a child talking to herself as she immerses herself in her own make-believe world; completely unaware, and entirely unbothered, by how unconvincing it looks. There is also something distinctly clownish in the way she makes the body itself awkward. She makes us hyper-aware of the performer consciously telling their body what to do: a gesture becomes too deliberate, a walk too exaggerated, a facial expression held just slightly too long. Ricote’s body seems like an unruly object that has to be instructed into performing. She is particularly distressed by her inability to cry on cue. The joke, of course, is that she can cry; she can cry perfectly well about not being able to cry. Acting requires the performer to manufacture real emotions, creating an inherently ridiculous collision between sincerity and pretence.
Ricote’s own acting experience seems to feed directly into this material. We see her younger self performing in a telenovela, accompanied by brilliantly observed colloquial English subtitles. The scenes capture the gloriously coarse acting and heightened scripts characteristic of the genre, and given Ricote’s background in it, it is no surprise that she finds such rich comic potential in the very idea of acting. Ricote has the perfect source material for clowning, which is a genre already built on exaggerated emotion and spectacularly artificial performances. You just wish the show would push the joke further.
She has great fun with her audience, however. At one point she asks for suggestions of things she can act out, and one audience member — naming no names, let’s call them RuPaul’s Drag Race UK series 2 contestant Bimini Bon-Boulash — offers “gardener”. “Gardening?” Ricote replies. “Because I am Latina?” It’s a wonderfully quick example of the show’s willingness to let the audience feed its strange, constantly mutating comic logic.
Then, in the final minutes, Ay Am! takes a startling turn. The balloons are popped and the red dress comes off. Ricote scrambles around the stage, stripped of the exaggerated body, shaking two small lights as she gallops around like some kind of terrifying little spirit performing a midnight ritual. The naked figure that emerges feels less like liberation than the scary little creature within who has been desperate all along to be seen, admired and desired. After an hour spent constructing increasingly ridiculous versions of herself for an audience, this is the most revealing one of all. st revealing one of all.
Written by Maya Ricote and Dan Lees
Directed by Dan Lees
Published with Everything Theatre
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