Amy Ziff, the star and creator of the one-woman show “Accident,” is one-third of the band BETTY—sort of a punkier Indigo Girls. She’s a Jewish lesbian, a blonde with dreadlocks and generally a funny woman. In “Accident,” she’s also dead. Do all these qualities mean she’s worth spending an evening with? Probably not. How about a little under an hour? Well, sure.
The basic “plot” of the show, as much as there is one, is that Amy, playing herself, I think, has “accidentally” (get it?) slit her wrists in the bathtub. She finds herself in some sort of black box theater of an afterworld, and uses this opportunity to expound on her life, her brushes with death, the things she’s done, her fear of flying and so on.
The idea of the afterworld provides some structure to the monologues; the first few minutes are spent adding up the “good” and “bad” and trying to figure out where she’ll go next, and most of her tangents are somehow related to her dead body. But the overall effect is more like a standup comedian than a real dramatic arc. We get occasional “why, just the other day”-style transitions, or digressions that don’t really relate back to any overarching theme.
Surprisingly, the show still manages to be cohesive. Watching “Accident” is the equivalent of hanging out for an hour with your chatty, slightly ridiculous friend. And Ziff is funny. She calls herself a diva, and she has a flair for the dramatic that makes every story she tells seem exciting and significant. She’s fantastic at impressions, does funny voices and gestures and her life is interesting and varied enough to have yielded a few excellent tales.
Unfortunately, all too often her jokes are aimed at easy targets—gynecologists, flight attendants named Misty, Yiddish grandmothers and, for some reason, Linda Blair. While there aren’t any moments that make you sit up and take notice, there are several that make you laugh a lot.
In the end, it’s not quite enough. The format of the show actually hampers Ziff; “Accident” confines the star to her bathtub and her death-centric theme, rather than letting her just talk. Ziff seems like a person who’s lived and done a lot, and it seems likely that she has some perspectives and ideas that I could stand to hear and that might even enlighten me.
But “Accident” is such a slight little show that I don’t really know. Ziff made me laugh, but she didn’t have that much to say. She loves her mother, she has had a lot of sex and she doesn’t want to die. If it weren’t for the blonde dreadlocks and the electric cello, she could be anyone. I’d gladly spend a whole day with Amy Ziff, but an hour was enough for “Accident.”
Accident runs through Sept. 30 at the Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW. $15-$50.
