The Sound of Learning To Love Yourself

Just moments into his new solo show, “Love Me,” Drew Michael tells the audience, “Some people think I’m intense.” It’s less a confession or a warning and more of an understatement, as even by that point, Mr. Michael, who will reference his intensity repeatedly throughout the 75-minute piece, has established that he’s not an easygoing fellow — onstage, at least.Frustration, with himself and with others, might be a better word to describe what Mr. Michael, a former writer for “Saturday Night Live,” who has also crafted and starred in two HBO specials, expresses through much of the show. First presented during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe three years ago and now making its off-Broadway debut as part of the New York Comedy Festival, “Love Me” is, at first blush, a study in personal and professional self-sabotage, tracing its creator and star through failed relationships and a career opportunity that went disastrously awry. Comedy is often born of pain, of course, but it turns out Mr. Michael’s pain has an unusual source, one that makes him more sympathetic than some other jesters who trade in rage and snark. Upon entering the theater, audience members are given headphones, which will be worn through the majority of the play — not to assist in enhancing reality in some way, but to enable us to experience it more like our host has through most of his 41 years.“I have a slight hearing loss I’ve had since I was a kid,” Mr. Michael explains, shortly after introducing himself, and this too is gradually revealed as an understatement. Daniel Kluger’s sound design helps take us not only through the various chapters of Mr. Michael’s life, from a childhood marked by humiliation to his first real romance, at the age of 23, to later misadventures in comedy, but inside his head, where a voice born of isolation and despair continually argues with and insults him.This can all be difficult for any reasonably sensitive person to watch, or listen to. I found a segment where Mr. Michael recalls being embarrassed before an entire elementary-school class, including the girl who was his apparently unrequited crush, particularly excruciating, if still funny.Yet under the lively direction of Prashanth Venkataramanujam, a writer himself whose credits include Netflix’s “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj,” Mr. Michael manages to generally avoid veering into self-pity — or at least to mitigate it more skillfully than you might expect, given some of the challenges and little catastrophes documented here. Pretty much everything is fair game for milking laughs, even his tortured relationship with his mother, who comes across as a pretty nasty piece of work.As it progresses, though, “Love Me” becomes more earnest, and the shift is less of a surprise than an affirmation of something that has been lurking under Mr. Michael’s acerbic observations and anecdotes all along. “They say if you want to find love, you have to love yourself. That’s annoying,” he declares early on. Hopefully it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that, by the end of this sometimes unsettling but engaging show, his attitude has changed.

The Sound of Learning To Love Yourself

The Sound of Learning To Love Yourself

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