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Betty Rules! is the title of a much-celebrated show for which Amy Ziff, one-third of the long-lived, D.C.-bred pop band Betty, got a Helen Hayes Award nomination last year. I didn’t see it, and I’ve never seen Betty play, so I can’t comment upon its, or their, alleged reign. But I can state with authority the following: Accident, Ziff's one-woman show that opens Theatre J’s new “Incubator Series” of works-in-progress, does not rule.
Oh, it suggests. It probably watches a lot of C-SPAN. Perhaps it even, God help us all, blogs. But rule? ‘Fraid not. It’s too meandering (though it runs only an hour), too smug, too self-congratulatory. It’s meant to be Ziff’s confessional on the precipice of eternity. But alas, she cheats: There isn’t a genuine moment of regret, or even self-doubt, in it. Whenever Ziff supposedly chides herself for a life of rock 'n' roll excess, as when she describes an office visit with an impossibly prudish and judgmental gynecologist, it just comes off as bragging.
It goes down like this: We open on — surprise! — Ziff, regarding her own fresh corpse. Some kind of bathtub mishap, apparently. Or was it? A razor was involved, so there is some ambiguity. The occasion of her demise turns out to be a marvelous opportunity for her to reflect upon her life — as a daughter, as a lover, as a small-time rock star. Projected behind her is a running tally of all the good and bad things she did before shuffling off the old mortal coil. (Good: She was a camp counselor. Bad: She never prayed.) It’s all irresistibly fascinating, especially if your name happens to be Amy Ziff.
Okay, that’s not fair: The show will also appeal to a loyal Cult of Ziff, and to them I say, go, with my compliments. You will have a wonderful time. But I’m guessing this is a self-selecting group. Only you can say whether you’re desperate to know what Ziff’s phobias are, what diets she’s tried, what drugs she’s taken and what she sees when she takes, or quits, those drugs. If that's you, then by all means, run, do not walk, to the Studio Theatre’s Stage 4. (Yep, that’s the Studio Theatre. Theatre J’s usual space at 16th and Q was booked with Pangs of the Messiah.)
There’s no denying Ziff’s gifts as a performer — she’s a dynamite vocal caricaturist, for example; the laserlike precision with which she juggles the accents and speech patterns of, say, her Deliverance-refugee boss at the Fairfax donut shop where she used to work, or the lunch lady at Heathrow Airport who sold her three-week-old pasta, makes you long to see what she’d do with stronger material. But the catalog of bits we get here, united by nothing more than a through-line of towering narcissism, seldom rises above the level of mediocre stand-up.
Even mediocre stand-up has its moments: Ziff’s brief digression — everything in this show is a digression — into a stock women-in-prison movie character is funny, funny stuff. And her remembrances of her mother are genuinely moving. But it isn’t enough. Ziff, an actor, musician, writer, and pontificator, really does seem to lead an interesting life. I just wish she’d have let me reach that conclusion on my own, instead of staging a fake moral crisis to tell me all about it.
Accident, the inaugural production in Theatre J's Incubator Series, is at the Studio Theatre's Stage 4 through Sept. 23. Tickets are available online.
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