After her Side Bar show, she tossed her pink wig on a table, sat down, sipped some white wine and, when asked, tried to figure out Laurel Casey. The best she came up with was that, like the rest of us, and like her act, she is a puzzled and puzzling work in progress.
“I don’t know what I’m doing right now,” she declared. “Maybe that’s why I’m not making it, because I don’t know what I’m doing. I just want people to feel better. That’s the only reason I even do this. And they feel better when they see me struggling, or they feel better about themselves and what they’re going through, to see me or anybody pull themselves up.”
Laurel doesn’t make things easy for herself. She likes to play “empty rooms” and “unpopular places,” a space “that isn’t conducive to performance.” Comedy clubs? Forget about it. “They’re already preconditioned to react a certain way. So you can’t really get a legitimate reaction from them. There’s no communication there, because it’s all prearranged.”
She describes her typical stage persona as “the washed up, beaten-down artist,” cautioning herself: “But that doesn’t always work. Nobody wants to see a downer.”
Maybe Laurel Casey is having such a hard time because she has plunged through art and back out again into the all-too-real world, the way she was being Mona in her act and then kept stepping out as Laurel until you couldn’t tell the two apart. Maybe success would feel too much like failure. Her act is to, when you least expect it, act real. The usual sorts of success in life are so unreal, Laurel’s value system apparently has gotten skewed.
“The wounded healer-clown, that’s how I see myself,” she says. “The clown, the fool, the idiot savant. The fool that’s sort of an outcast, sort of the misfit.
“They depend on me to fail,” Laurel Casey adds, sounding more certain than when the conversation started. “They depend on me to get fired.”
Postscript: Not long after that performance, the town woke up to Casey’s presence. She was given an artist-in-residence position at Firehouse 13 and a monthly column in Get Rhode Island magazine.
