Jim Carroll – At the Lansdowne Street Playhouse – Review

Jim Carroll

At the Lansdowne Street Playhouse
by Sheril Stanford

Jim Carroll is, quite simply, a world class story teller. From his first tentative words to his intense down-on-his-knees encore song, from beginning to end, Carroll held his Lansdowne Street Playhouse audience spellbound. Delving right into the genre for which he is best known – urban drug culture – Carroll chose for his first selection a piece called “Curtis’s Charm,” a funny, sad, sweet story about Carroll’s alcoholic and drug-addicted companion, Curtis, who is convinced that his wife and mother-in-law are working voodoo on him to steal both his drugs and his money. Carroll takes on the role of spiritual advisor, devising for Curtis a talisman to ward off the voodoo. The story ends with a spooky, coincidental event.

Carroll chose a number of other selections from the same source, his 1993 collection of poems, Fear of Dreaming. Included was a dreamy piece about martial arts called “Duelling the Monkey,” dedicated in the book to Lou and Sylvia Reed. Carroll also read “Just Visiting,” creating intense visuals ranging from breasts to bank robberies and the repeated line, “death is white, not black.”

“A Fragment for Kurt Cobain” was a beautiful and moving piece, which Carroll read with almost brutal intensity. It was painful to watch Carroll expose, on stage, his own personal fears of treading too precisely in Cobain’s footsteps. Other topics included spontaneous human combustion, brains being sucked out the noses of mummies, Orange Julius stands, Joey Heatherton, nightclubbing, and then, as Carroll said, “back to planet Earth” to end the show with an explicit and sorrowful selection about a “survivor” of the current tragic events in Bosnia. After what seemed like an hour of applause, Carroll came back to the stage and sang his only song of the evening.

Carroll is perhaps best known in the mainstream for the movie The Basketball Diaries, based on his autobiographical book of the same name which chronicled his youth and his increasingly out-of-control heroin addiction. Carroll’s manner was tentative, his hands and voice slightly shaky throughout the performance. It seemed there was nothing between Carroll and his audience but his words. It doesn’t get this raw very often.