"Teenagers are unmitigated dickbags," declares Daniel Kitson halfway through his funny and tender solo show It's Always Right Now, Until It's Later, currently running at St. Ann's Warehouse in DUMBO. This uncontroversial fact is established by way of explaining that Caroline Carpenter, one of two fictional Brits at the center of Kitson's exhaustively detailed monologue, is an exception to the rule. Yet that's probably the most exceptional thing about Caroline: As a teenager, she was kinder and more sensible than most adolescents, but she's no hero, and her life story, as told by Kitson, is not distinguished by the extraordinary circumstances we've come to expect from dramatic characters. Kitson, a writer/performer, has instead taken the stage to reveal the extraordinary poetry in the "ordinary" moments.
The other unlikely star of Kitson's narrative is William Rivington, another random Brit who, as Kitson's story begins, is nearing the end of his life. Years ago, William finally settled on what his last words would be, and now, as death looms, he has to be careful to time it right. Because as Kitson hilariously points out, if you say your last words too soon, you may inadvertently say so more last words in passing later on, like "more methadone, please" or "Family Feud is on." But if you wait too long to utter your final remarks, you could miss your chance entirely. And so William files his last words (tantalizingly withheld from the audience) nine days early, and spends the rest of his dying days in defiant silence, barely resisting an urge to tell off a priest come to give him last rites.
Kitson is a mordant wit, and as he blazes through his 90 minute monologue, you can't help but marvel at his vivid imagination and bracing stage presence. A devout hater of the so-called fourth wall, Kitson occasionally stops on a dime to ad lib about the audience's reaction to a joke, or to explain how his speech impediment affects his choices on stage. "Yes, I have a stutter," Kitson mentioned at one point, in remarks that appeared unscripted. "If it makes you in any way uncomfortable, you are a bigot." After a beat, he added, "Always nice to discover something about yourself at the theater!"
On a shiny black stage with nothing but a couple of chairs and numerous dangling Edison lightbulbs, Kitson unpacks the carefully edited story of William and Caroline as they approach each other from opposite directions: Caroline from childhood to death, William from his elusive last words to youth. Each bulb represents a different moment that Kitson has selected from each of their lives, and for the most part they're not the "big" moments, but the seemingly forgettable moments in between, such as when William is stuck on a bus with a wretched brat, or Caroline goes flying off her bicycle, or William's friend Frank blasts the television to drown out the side-effects of his constipation, or Caroline sits in the garden drinking lemonade and reading a magazine on her day off, shivering but determined to do what she'd planned to do with her weekend, weather be damned.
You keep expecting their lives to intertwine, and they ultimately do, but in a subtle way that defies the audience's expectations. Kitson warns you in the beginning that it's not a love story, and while there is love, it's not between William and Caroline; their connection to each other in this narrative remains highly elusive. What they seem to have in common is that they're commoners leading "ordinary" lives like the rest of us (unlike Gregory Church, the fictional character at the center of Kitson's spellbinding St. Ann's debut last year), and their suffering and joy is, in Kitson's hands, no less compelling than any conventional dramatic narrative. His play illustrates that there are no insignificant moments, and in recreating each one in intimate detail, we're reminded that these moments here, with this exceptional storyteller, are as extraordinary as all the rest.
