Mike Birbiglia: The Old Man and the Pool Broadway Reviews

You could also consider the rehashing of certain stories and themes as part of a large-scale autobiographical enterprise. Catching up with him at regular intervals, we are watching the construction of a lifelong narrative arc. It's a bit like a comic, one-man version of the Michael Apted documentary series 'Up,' a decades-long project in which that director caught up with the same group of people at seven-year intervals. I, for one, am looking forward to hearing about Birbiglia's next medical tests, not to mention how he is going to spin tales of Oona's growing up.

There is an appealing smoothness, simplicity, and sense of construction to Birbiglia's shows. (Seth Barrish, who serves as Birbiglia's regular director, surely deserves much credit.) Birbiglia excels at offering fun anecdotes, dramatizing conversations with offstage characters, making Seinfeld-style observations about daily life and performing occasional physical bits.

'Dives' is perhaps the wrong word for Birbiglia's approach; he's more of a wader. His new yarn centers on visits to doctors-to address troubling breathing issues and his family history of cardiac arrest-but also includes long and enjoyable digressions about his childhood experiences with public swimming. Birbiglia doesn't wallow in his suffering, but he doesn't go that deep; part of his great charm as a performer is in the way he deflects pity with stoic geniality, mentioning potentially grave issues (such as what sound like anxiety attacks) lightly and fleetingly, almost in passing. He's in the pool, but you never worry that he's really going to drown. He's having too much fun in there, splashing around.

Birbiglia talks like he's reciting, slurring his words slightly, so you have to lean in to make out what he says. But when it comes to the laughs, his timing is impeccable, a subtle pause, a sentence that ends a beat before you'd expect or continues on into a clause that changes its meaning altogether. Little by little, he goes deep - pun absolutely not intended, but too apt to retract - getting all meaning-of-life on us, before orchestrating a gut-busting 'moment of silence' that is anything but.

Lest you think all of this sounds too heavy to support the 'comic' part in 'comic storyteller,' know that Birbiglia's audience rarely stops laughing throughout the performance, even when - especially when - he calls for a moment of silence for a fellow YMCA swimmer who died in an absurdly preventable manner. Birbiglia, with a sort of faux-anger, scolds individual audience members whose giggles soon give way to howls, like children trying to contain laughter in church.

He swims. He writes in his journal. He worries. He performs a show that's about swimming and making people laugh about bodies, but it's mostly about our need to laugh about death. And it's beautiful: exquisitely written, performed and designed, with all of Birbiglia's characteristic ear for tone and rhythm. The backdrop behind him, hung deliberately askew, becomes a slide, a medical display, a gurney, and the watery, tiled bottom of a pool. All anecdotes and metaphors click neatly into one another; all the stories build and coalesce and flow from one event to the next.

We are all charmed, beguiled. He says he does not have a swimmer's body, but a drowner's body. The Brooklyn YMCA is less a building than a smell, he conveys in one barnstorming riff. Birbiglia finds humor in everything around him-and tells it so smoothly he makes it look effortless. This ease on stage is a good camouflage of an ingenious comic technician. This is not the lackadaisical piece of theater it seems, but tightly constructed and wittily performed.

If you've never seen Birbiglia, you'll quickly realize that his comedy is pointed but never cruel; though he mentions his wife, Jenny, and daughter, Oona, frequently, his prime target is himself; his pacing is near-perfect (only one bit, right at the end, runs out of steam); and a left-hook packed with emotion and sincerity often comes when you least expect it. 'I feel like we don't choose what we remember about our own lives,' he says about seeing his father, hospitalized, after an emergency angioplasty, 'but what I remember the most about that day is that it was the first time I saw my dad as a person.'

A spry and seemingly healthy 44-year old, Birbiglia confesses to a history of serious health issues. Thus we have a rumination on severe obstacles which ought not be funny but, in the author's telling, are positively side-splitting. Along the way he meanders off into myriad tangents-wrestling, chlorine, chicken parmigiana-which provoke torrents of laughter while always circling back to the matter at hand. All the while he reveals himself to be a first-class stage clown with mastery of both verbal and physical arts.

Birbiglia has a way of swallowing his punchlines, of going off in tangents that circle back to hard truths, that signal his gift for shaping an overarching narrative within the confines of the stand-up form. Yes, there are jokes - like his comedic complaint about how Airbnb's are guilty of false advertising for failing to deliver breakfast - but many serve as popcorn kernels strewn along the path to his larger point. (A point that he often then subverts with a perfectly timed punchline.) When you're in the good company of Birbiglia, after all, it feels perfectly normal to laugh in the face of death.

Of course these themes are all interconnected, but they are also abstract. There isn't much attempt to tie them all together narratively. Instead Birbiglia will throw out a huge question around mortality, then quickly pivot to an anecdote or a silly bit. When the bits are this funny, it's hard to complain too much. An extended routine around chlorine in YMCA pools builds beautifully to a gag about the mob using them to dispose of bodies; Birbiglia's continued insistence that no-one in the world possibly exercises five days a week gets funnier each time. But when we circle back around to Birbiglia announcing that he beat his diabetes, it's jarringly out of nowhere, like we just skipped a whole chapter of the story.

'The Old Man and the Pool,' opening tonight at the Vivian Beaumont, recalls the title of Hemingway's novella, 'The Old Man and the Sea,' and can be likewise interpreted as being about the struggle against death, except it's funny. An engaging standup comedian even (especially?) when riffing on uncomfortable subjects like illness and aging and ugly genitalia, Birbiglia, in his fifth comic monologue (the second one on Broadway) has put together a show that's not his best, but it's his latest, and that is likely enough for his fans.