Full Mental Jacket

Full Mental Jacket: A Little Overwhelming

The Off Center,

October 28

Running Time: 2 hrs

A table at Flipnotics. A woman is reading Infinite Jest and looking at her watch. Finally, a man rushes in 20 minutes late, makes apologies, expresses eloquent outrage about the way teenagers talk, and then remembers an appointment and dashes off again. The waiter comes over to the jilted coffee date and asks, "What's with him?" "He's Brenner," the date indulgently replies. The waiter, with a weird respect, rejoins, "I know what you mean."

This is one of the sketches penned by and starring Wayne Alan Brenner, who also happens to be the Chronicle's Theatre Listings editor. Sound a tad self-involved? You bet. The show is an unflinching ode to megalomania, and Brenner's crotchety stage persona employs many genres (stand-up comedy, music, performance art, reading) in this series of tales and songs about Brenner's twisted thoughts and absurdly abusive relationships. While Brenner has indisputable stage presence and his original, eerily robotic songs in particular are appealing in their frantic intensity ("Sitting in the armchair, watching the scre-e-een"), the joke of Full Mental Jacket -- creative Brenner hawking neurotic Brenner -- is not, in this reviewer's humble and completely irrelevant opinion, an especially satisfying joke, as thoroughly executed as it may be.

Early in the show, Brenner mentions this reviewer by name, saying something about how some local critics, "such as The Austin Chronicle's Ada Calhoun," disapprove of audience participation. Sure do. Brenner then immediately launches into a round of classically squirm-inducing audience participation, singling a reluctant guy out of the audience and asking him about his day, then harping on the guy's trip to Red Lobster with fervent questions like, "Where did you see this red lobster?"

Not only is the fourth wall broken (though blessedly only in that one instance), but Brechtian postmodern self-referentiality abounds, with all its "Hey, did we mention that we know we're onstage?" gimmickry: sweeping the stage, doing lighting checks, bringing out the script to check lines. The references to the theatre take on a strikingly ironic significance because this show has a bent far more literary than theatrical. Brenner's drug rant about getting stoned, listening to Carmina Burana, and nearly choking to death on peanut butter is one of the funnier, more personal sketches, but like many of the skits (even the one about the Flinstones' sex lives), it employs language that's jarringly formal. Aside from the exaggerated gestures, there is little to distinguish the Death by Peanut Butter skit, with its "mimsy shadows of the kitchenette," from a sturdy work of creative nonfiction. Nearly all pretense of theatrics is lost with the last skit, as the sadly underused ensemble (composed of Brenner's wife Molly Beth Brenner and several other notable actors) engages in a group reading, from scripts, of Brenner's quirkily pornographic tale "Love Among the Rooms."

In the stylish program, Brenner describes the show as "a vehicle for the hideously self-aggrandizing Wayne Alan Brenner"; he describes himself as "that insufferable little martinet"; his picture is on the inside and outside cover; he signs the damn thing. As a tribute to egomania, it doesn't get more straightforward than this, and props to Brenner for pulling no punches at the task. Plenty of writer/director/stars put on shows equally self-aggrandizing, shrouded by a thinly veiled pretense of humility. No pretense here; only the Brenner onslaught is a little overwhelming if you don't have the aforementioned coffee date's forbearance toward Brenner the haughty onstage character. One wonders if the material isn't better suited to book form, whereby the language's convolutions would be less distracting and one could mete out one's own dosages of Brennericity.