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But the trauma never comes. There is no childhood experience that can be used to neatly explain the artist’s psychology. (Or, there sort of is, but it’s not what you think.) Instead, in the show’s climactic gag, the actress Kate (who is playing the actress Kate) can’t cry at the moment in the show (about not crying) where—she swears—she always does. Berlant, now “herself,” stops the show and demands that we do not leave until she sheds a tear. She works herself into an emotional frenzy, building a monologue around a suggested word from the crowd. Her eyes well; “There!” she shouts. The tear falls. With it, three layers of reality—the world of the cheesy one-woman show about not being able to cry, the world of the actress failing to put on that show, and the world of the creator, Berlant, who is orchestrating the lead up to this moment—collapse into a whole.

The show is a bigger risk artistically but safer to execute than her improv, Berlant told me one afternoon before previews. It feels “liberating and exotic to know this is going to happen,” she said. In her FX special, she operates on instinct; she mugs for the crowd, laughs at herself, flubs words, then castigates herself for mispronouncing them. Even on film, a sense of liveness crackles. At first, Kate was looser, too; she would just bring a list of scenes with her onstage. When she began workshopping the script in L.A. in front of crowds, Burnham came to almost every show. He “forced” the script “into structure,” Berlant said, which she needed in order to risk genuine failure. The previous evening, her tearful moment had come too quickly. “Bo was like, ‘You should take longer, because it’s a better payoff,’ ” she recalled.
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[Kate Berlant and John Early] prove time and again that as singular as they may be individually as scene-stealers, they’re a powerhouse duo together.



















