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Comedian Jennifer Blaine’s carport was a thing of beauty: A lovely wooden door facing one of South Philly’s tiny rowhouse streets, complete with a mounted basketball hoop for neighborhood kids to enjoy.
Then, on Labor Day, 2022, someone set fire to it and the adjoining neighbor’s car.
Definitely not funny.
But somehow Blaine, who counts U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders as a distant cousin, manages to find the humor in it, turning neighborhood nastiness into “The Carport,” a funny – and timely – uplifting love letter to neighbors, community and resilience.
“Someone blew up our carport and set it on fire, but the show is less about that but about everything that came afterwards,” Blaine said, talking about her one-woman recounting that premiered in sold-out shows at September’s Philly Fringe Festival. Blaine will perform “The Carport” again March 13 and April 17 at a music studio in the heart of the Ninth Street Market.
“With arson, you don’t know what the process is, until you have to pick up the pieces,” she said.
The pieces include navigating the city’s arson investigation process, construction permitting for a new carport, and her relationship with her husband.
As time went on, every little step became a multi-mountain challenge.
“My husband and I were at each other’s throats,” Blaine said.
They disagreed, for just one example, over whether to salvage the posts that held up the carport, which in turn supported the lovely wooden door.
“We turned on each other.”
That’s when Cousin Bernie, whom Blaine mimics with uncanny accuracy (in terms of his accent, not his appearance, obviously), shows up as the couple’s marital counselor, with equal opportunity scoldings.
“That was my excuse to play and be Bernie,” she said.
She also plays 30 other characters, including a suspicious fire lieutenant, a pit-bull-owning neighbor, a drag queen political activist, and her husband. “My husband has to be a good sport,” she laughed.
“A lot of people I encountered are difficult,” she said. “I’m bumping up against all these bureaucratic challenges. Then, there are my neighbors who are watching everything and inputting all the time and have their agendas.”
She found out later that her neighbors all felt sorry for her but didn’t want to upset her by telling her they felt sorry for her.
“All my characters are based on real people,” some of whom showed up to see her performance at the Fringe. They approved, she said, although in her version, the fire lieutenant had a moustache. In real life, though, he has tried but has been singularly unsuccessful in growing one.
“They are all people I met, and I just don’t remember,” she said. “Or they are seven different people who become one person and the music of that person is in me. That’s how I connect.
“The beauty of their perspectives or their voices will stay with me and become an amalgamation of things in my unconscious.”
Another beauty?
How, while stuck in some bureaucratic, interpersonal nightmare, some person or something happens to loosen the situation, to advance it. It may not seem that way at the time, but it evolves.
“You aren’t alone in your suffering,” she said. “There is community. There are ways through, even when it doesn’t seem that there are ways through.”
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“The Carport,” by Jennifer Blaine is at Mister John’s Music, 904 S. 9th St., Phila. 7:30 p.m. March 13, and 8 p.m. April 17. Tickets at jenniferblaine.com.
