Let’s say you’ve flipped through a newspaper, reading this or that; sponged the breakfast crumbs off the table, loaded the dishwasher and wrestled your child into a car seat for a trip to your mother’s. All insignificant stuff, yes? Daniel Kitson would probably disagree.
As the British performer proves in his new and touching one-man show, “It’s Always Right Now, Until It’s Later,” it’s those tiny moments, so easily ignored and forgotten, that make up our lives.
Kitson, who won raves for last year’s “The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church,” is a compelling storyteller and, more importantly, a humanist. He deals with ordinary lives marked by quiet or not-so-quiet desperation, infusing his tales with as much humor as pathos.
Bearded, bespectacled and unassuming, he delivers his monologue in a thick Yorkshire accent at a breathless pace that’s occasionally halted by an endearing stutter.
“If it’s made you remotely uncomfortable,” he says of that affliction, after one such interruption, “then you are a bigot.” And then he adds brightly, “Always nice to learn something about yourself at the theater!”
The piece concerns two fictional contemporary characters named William Rivington and Caroline Carpenter — but, as Kitson quickly points out, theirs “is not a love story.” He alternately relates quiet scenes from the span of each person’s life, which began decades apart and intersect only for one brief, inconsequential moment that, in this performer’s talented hands, achieves a deep poignancy.
Kitson’s gift for language is extraordinary. As he tells it, a young couple’s first attempt at bathing together results in “a semi-submerged nightmare of flailing limbs and frantic apologies.”
Each anecdote is represented by one of dozens of tiny light bulbs that hang over the stage, bathing the performer in a warm glow. He darts from one to another and occasionally carefully cups them in his hands, like a master puppeteer. Which, in the truest sense, he is.