The show was inspired by a trip home when the town graced Magnuson with a Famous Persons Award. Rooting through the family attic, she finds an old diary, and this ignites a visionary flight in which she practically digitalizes herself as she metamorphoses into a variety of screwed-up identities. There’s the ideal housewife who cooks, pays the maid, decorates the house–and breaks down in crying jags. A woman remembers “my first orgasm, sliding down the mahogany banister. I’ve been looking for one like it ever since.” A homeless squatter, an aging cheerleader, a hitchhiker who’s raped and murdered by a trucker named Piglet, a woman sending a Snoopy sticker to her hungry foster child in South America-out of such characters Magnuson builds an American collage starred with pain and striped with corrosive humor. Benignly bonkers, she dances an " Oliver Stone" ballet in black tights, later appearing in Chinese Commie drag, waving a red flag inscribed with McDonald’s golden arches.
Tomlin shapes fully fleshed characters into sustained scenes. Magnuson ransacks the cultural glossary, conjuring up media stars, movies, tabloid horrors, in quick bursts of language. Her images whiz by like meteor showers in your mind’s eye. At times you get lost in space; for all her brilliance, Magnuson could use a colleague like Tomlin’s co-writer, Jane Wagner, to help bring more structure to her vision. But the vision has power and pathos. At one point she “yearns for the innocent time when Mom would tiptoe into your bedroom, pick up her acoustic guitar and sing a lullaby.” And she does just that, pausing to tell the audience: “I don’t mean to be ironic or postmodern. This is not a parody. Get it?” We get it: here’s one of our hippest artists having the guts to tell us that she knows that hip can be a brilliantly lit but dead-end street. She’s calling upon us-and herself as well-to be unafraid of honest emotion not just to be wised up but to be wise.
