People's Light presents Jennifer Childs's 'I Will Not Go Gently'

For years and through various projects, Childs has thrown her South Philadelphia stoop-sitting and soliloquizing “Patsy” character into many a mix at 1812 Productions, the comedy-based theater company she founded and helms as producing artistic director. Yet, along with the language and rhythms of the aged (a 90-year-old trying her hand at standup comedy) and the tweens (a manically multitasking adolescent who sees her mom’s taste in music and tattoos as “lame”), the agility of Childs’s facial muscles, carriage, and physical disposition is breathtaking. To watch and listen to her through this second iteration of Childs’s show, as directed by Harriet Power, is an awe-inspiring trek through how quickly the generation gap widens.

Childs’s acting ability — beyond comedy — is the most worthwhile part of this semi-musical show. Its title paraphrased from the Dylan Thomas poem, I Will Not Go Gently marks her finest, funkiest tour de force as a thespian. That's saying something, considering how many miles she has logged on Philadelphia stages.

One woman, full stage

As a theater kid’s look at rock-and-roll (with music composed and performed by Christopher Colucci), the show offers a warmly funny but occasionally broad vision of the music business. A 1980s British gloss-punk (Sierra Mist, a black-clad songstress with several jokes under her studded belt regarding the soda from which she derived her name), attempts a comeback after birthing both a child and a disastrously pretentious Y2K-themed concept album. That she is trying to return without acknowledging aging or changing tastes in music connects her to the show’s other characters.

Other characters include a 40-something insomniac podcaster who rambles on about household products and how Mist’s return to the stage makes them both seem old. The podcaster’s Twittering-Googling-texting-video-chatting daughter is embarrassed by her mom’s back tattoo, dancing, and taste in music. The daughter has, in fact, listed all her mother’s issues as a sort of personal manifesto. Meanwhile, the teen’s 90-year-old grandmother is starting a comedy career with jokes about golden-years dating habits and “senior moments.”

All of these women question their own tastes and faith in an effort to make themselves relevant rather than passé. Sierra Mist is but their totem — for better or worse.

Childs also performs as a solo 25-year class reunion, stunningly switching through the room’s various personalities. These old friends are considering buying tickets to Mist’s comeback shows in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.

Another character, Daphne Thundergrass, is a 1970s TV actress (think Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman) turned self-help guru who insists that women don the (literal) cape of self-empowerment. While the former group is sharp and poignant, Thundergrass’s raison d’etre left me stymied as to how she figured into the panoply.

As a story of how and why we age out of our youthful obsessions, I Will Not Go Gently nails down its swirling emotions. Happily, the broad Bombeck-ian strokes that threaten to take us out of that hard, fast, funny story never last longer than a pop song.