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Harry Potter has his invisibility cloak. With it, he can move about unseen.
Fringe performer Julia Masli has her clown outfit – her “handy” hat, a mannequin’s leg where her arm should be. With it, she can be who she’s not – the open, vulnerable, silly solver of non-solvable problems in her widely praised solo show, “ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.”
“I’m quite a socially anxious person,” she said Tuesday during a break in tech setup at the Proscenium at the Drake theater where she’ll be doing five Philadelphia Fringe Festival shows Thursday through Sunday.
On stage, Masli, or rather Masli as a clown, asks audience members for their problems. The clown then suggests solutions. One time, for example, an audience member mentioned “sleep” and ended up on stage, on a chaise lounge, with an eye mask for the rest of the performance.
“The clown is me, but a ‘me’ who is not doing the social role,” Masli said, explaining how someone so open and impish on stage can be so people-shy off it. “The clown in me gives me a certain freedom to be quite child-like. It’s still me, but not ‘the me’ that’s trying to get things right.”
Across Europe and the U.S., “ha ha,” (for short, from now on, because I’m tired of counting to seven) has been universally praised for its mixture of silliness and solemn-ness and for the way it builds connections at the intersection of laughter and tears.
And, if that doesn’t work, there’s always duct tape.
“You enter like in a dream,” she said. “The sound, there’s lovely sound design. The sound envelops you, along with the lighting.”
“During the show, you are very engaged and you notice other people,” she said. “You hopefully will leave with new friends. It’s a funny thing to explain an absurd clown show. But people help one another. They get to know each other, and it happens in the show. Or they bond together if they get taped together. Anything can happen.”
Sometimes, and it’s quite accidentally coincidental, the problems she ends up solving are her own.
Recently, for example, she was performing “ha ha” in her home-country of Estonia with family members in the audience. At that show, an audience member’s problem was that she was missing her brother.
“My little sister was in the audience, and I hadn’t seen her for months and I missed her so much. I said, `Are you here?’ And she said ‘yes.’ I cried and she cried, and the girl missing her brother, she also cried. And she called her brother. That really helped me connect with my sister.”
“Vulnerability in life is also hard – especially with family being vulnerable is even harder. At that moment, it was really important to me,” Masli said. On stage, as a clown, she could emotionally express her love for her sister. But in a regular conversation, “I wouldn’t have really been able to tell her how much I missed her.”
Another time, as she was struggling in her personal life to deal with her grandfather’s dementia, an audience member brought up a similar problem. They ended up laughing over funny things that had happened because of dementia. On stage, Masli recalled walking with her grandfather during a hospital visit. He told her they were going to the opera.
“It was really nice to remember that and also to connect with that stranger who is going through what I’m going through,” Masli said. “Sometimes with friends I don’t even go that deep.”
Audience members get involved in solving problems – which may be, Masli said, one of the most beautiful aspects of the show.
“Most of the problems, I have no idea how to solve,” Masli said. “I can’t even begin. But the audience is being helpful. They want to help me at the moment and that’s what I feel is so special,” particularly, she said, at a time when the world seems so harsh and uncaring.
“It’s uplifting being able to be a part of a community where people are ready to help each other,” she said.
“I think it’s also a really joyous experience,” Masli said. “It’s an energizing thing to be in a room of people, connecting. The things that come up are real, but there’s so much laughter in it all.”
Masli’s gift for community building is what sold the Fringe team on booking “ha ha” for this year’s Fringe festival as part of its curated collection of shows, Fringe Arts Presents.
Fringe programming director and artistic producer Mikaela Boone fell in love with the show a few years ago at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland’s capital.
“We were so intrigued by how Julia Masli harnesses the truly unpredictable power of live performance to make a completely different show every night with her collaborators (in this case, the audience),” wrote Nell Bang-Jensen, chief executive and producing director of Fringe Arts.
“Julia’s work is an amazing example of the power of leaning into the ‘live-ness’ of theater, as well as its role as a site for community gathering. The piece is artistically bold, phenomenally theatrical, and, to me at least, deeply moving. It stretches an audience by asking them to engage in new ways but celebrates and welcomes them at the same time,” she wrote.
FYI
“ha ha ha ha ha ha ha,” Julia Masli, shows through Sunday, Sept. 13, The Proscenium at the Drake, 302 S. Hicks St.
