What I liked
.
What I didn't like
.
My overall impression
Adam Smith’s Partyboy feels less like a play than an absurd, hilarious conversation with the audience. Framed around Smith’s attempt to learn how to throw better parties, the show quickly becomes an intensely interactive experiment in connection. Audience members are asked to play rock, paper, scissors with strangers, offer up knock-knock jokes, and turn to their neighbors to decide which of them is more likely to be vulnerable in public.
The tone of the show flips on a dime. One moment, Smith is doing the “Bunny Hop,” a dance he learned from one of the instructional cassette tapes he plays throughout the show. Next, he might be sitting on the ground eating a brownie while suspenseful music swells. Between the sillier bits, Smith occasionally drops into monologues, perhaps better described as cryptic poetry, about the difficulty of socializing, the awkwardness of parties, and the strange vulnerability required to connect with other people.
For all its moments of vulnerability, Partyboy is ultimately built to entertain. On that front, it absolutely succeeds, filling the theater with laughter throughout the hour. Perhaps the more serious moments about social anxiety are slightly undercut by just how funny the rest of the show is, but Smith’s closing monologue is genuinely touching. As advertised, he does in fact “destroy a pop song on the trombone,” but I’ll let you find out what song it is for yourself.
