David Sedaris: David the Explorer

by Amy Martin
published Sunday, November 10, 2013

Fort Worth — Sex, death and travel were on David Sedaris’ mind at Bass Performance Hall on Saturday night. Every Sedaris show is different. He even keeps a running list so that he doesn’t repeat them. He’s been on the road since April promoting Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, his first book of essays (plus a few short stories) in five years after the fables of Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary and some other projects.

Much of An Evening with David Sedaris involved tales of travel peppered with some surprisingly lewd jokes. We are all voyeurs to Sedaris’s journeys, both interior and peripatetic, which can make his shows startlingly current. Honest and insightful, sardonic and yet kind, Sedaris is arch about his fellow travelers, even as he dissects the folly of their behaviors.

A masterful essayist, Sedaris led off with a tale that began in a Japanese language class in West Sussex, England, where he now lives, and ambled through a rant on upselling and breakfasts on the road. With a vignette about a Dunkin’ Donuts waitress who gave him the sass he deserved, he launched into the core: searching for connection amid the inane “How was your trip?” greetings from hotel and airplane employees, who have zero interest in the answer, and his attempts to engage them into moving “from profession to person.”

But it was the essay about his sister Tiffany that provided the night’s most memorable section. The story arc started last May with a phone call while at the DFW International Airport that Tiffany had committed suicide. It culminated just a half-year later with the publication of his essay in the New Yorker and the performance of it Saturday night, a tale of complicated loss and steps toward its redemption through the purchase of a North Carolina beach house.

But it was the essay about his sister Tiffany that provided the night’s most memorable section. The story arc started last May with a phone call while at the DFW International Airport that Tiffany had committed suicide. It culminated just a half-year later with the publication of his essay in the New Yorker and the performance of it Saturday night, a tale of complicated loss and steps toward its redemption through the purchase of a North Carolina beach house.

Tiffany lived on the edge of the highly competitive Sedaris family, her artistic talent tellingly channeled through mosaics made from shattered objects. Her familial allegiances shifted as new arguments arose and old ones were forgotten—she and David had not spoken for eight years—but she always kept one tenuous tether in. The scenes of shell-shocked siblings are haunting, such as standing in the apartment where Tiffany laid unfound for five days, an industrial fan from the building management still sucking out the smell, as they try by osmosis to understand a sister they had not known at all.

“ ‘Why do you think she did it?’ I asked as we stepped back into the sunlight. For that’s all any of us were thinking, had been thinking since we got the news. Mustn’t Tiffany have hoped that whatever pills she’d taken wouldn’t be strong enough, and that her failed attempt would lead her back into our fold? How could anyone purposefully leave us, us, of all people?”

It was perfect for an audience that clearly sought both wit and wisdom from Sedaris.

 Original post and video at: http://www.theaterjones.com/ntx/reviews/20131110144623/2013-11-10/Performing-Arts-Fort-Worth/An-Evening-with-David-Sedaris