"Janie Condon: Raw & Unchained" Directed by Gus Kaikkonen • St. Luke's Theatre, 308 West 46th St., NYC • Through May 3, 2011Doing stand-up comedy seems to make different demands on female performers from what it asks of males who attempt it. Many women who do it tend to come across as coarse and even hostile. That, however, isn't at all the way of things with Jane Condon, a longterm Greenwich, Connecticut, resident who has brought her solo show to New York. The leafy suburb supplies the meat for a lot of the material in the 80-minute show, which the affable performer calls "Janie Condon: Raw & Unchained." The title suggests a rougher journey than the experience actually provides. Condon, who is pretty but not intimidatingly so, deals honestly and directly with the Irish Catholic, Brockton, Massachusetts, family into which she was born, the youngest of four children. The family had problems with alcohol, and mental illness. The latter eventually claimed the life of her beloved older brother, Jack, an athletic and all-around Golden Boy who suffered from manic depression. After a fall from a fifth floor window, Jack was confined for life to a wheelchair, a fact which Condon relates with the openness and honesty that characterizes everything she says and does. The play is, logically enough, dedicated to her late brother's memory. She describes the name of the town in which she lives as "Greenwich, an old Indian word meaning 'Republican.'" Condon has been performing her show, on a casual basis, up and down the Eastern Seaboard, since the late l980s. Her first performance took place, as she remembers it, in Greenwich, at the Round Hill Nursery School's first fundraiser. Judging by what she's currently doing on the stage at St. Luke's, keeping the show fresh and spontaneous wouldn't seem the have been much of a problem. She doesn't regard herself, she tells her audiences, as a "comedienne." Instead, she sees herself as a "comedian." The difference may elude some of her hearers, but it's very clearly important to her. She is, after all, dealing with the familiar materials of her own life. She is, she offers, "just telling stories." Of her marriage to her husband, Ken, a real estate agent, she says "It's a mixed marriage. I'm Catholic. He's Republican." The youthful-looking couple have two sons, Todd and Mac, both in their 20s and finishing college. Among the tributes she has earned came in 2007, when she was chosen from 287 New York comedians as Audience Favorite on "Last Comic Standing," the reality television show. There is honesty to spare in "Janie Condon: Raw & Unchained," but none of the casual cruelty to be found in so much of the material of so many stand-up comics. And no pretentiousness. Gilding the lily would appear to be well beyond Jane Condon.
