In her hour-long solo show, Abby Wambaugh both spoofs and nails a wide variety of comedy styles, from standup to slapstick to Moth-style storytelling to musical comedy. At various times, she wears a banana suit, portrays the number 9, and (my favorite) imitates a vacuum cleaner. She hands a mic to an audience member to produce the sounds of a dribbling basketball in a segment that, as we see on the mini marquee, is entitled “One on None,” and gives a gift of white wigs to two other theatergoers to join her in one entitled “Old Men Learn Parkour.” 

Much of this is accompanied by playful props. Most of this is funny. Little of this seems worth developing into more than the sketch-like glimpses that we get. But one segment could not only be developed into a full show; in a way, it already has been; it explains the painful loss that led Wambaugh to become a comedian in the first place and start thinking about putting together her first show – which became “The First 3 Minutes of 17 Shows,” now playing at Dixon Place through October 25.

In the segment, which the mini marquee tells us is entitled “David Sedaris Essay,” Wambaugh reads aloud from the written text, like Sedaris does, which she drily suggests gives him an unfair advantage over other comedians. Wambaugh explains how she worked as a teacher and didn’t consider a career as a comedian until she was hospitalized after a miscarriage. It was there, she tells us poignantly,  that she started thinking about “new beginnings.”

In the segment immediately afterward, which is entitled “What Women Want,” her riff about the 2000 Mel Gibson comedy of the same name is interrupted by various audience members asking about the miscarriage – actually, the spotlight falls on individual members of the audience, but the pre-recorded voices we hear are reciting from Wambaugh’s script.

This is Wambaugh’s clever way of acknowledging, yes, I dropped a bombshell into my silly comedy variety show – which makes it something deeper than a silly comedy variety show.

“The First 3 Minutes of 17 Shows” debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year. It is, incredibly, the third show I’ve seen in New York over the past two weeks that originated at Edinburgh. While they are each inventive in their own way, they also follow something of a formula – or, if you prefer, fit a recognizable genre. Each is a short solo show that initially seems silly and superficial, and involves fun and informal audience interaction, but sooner or later spouts an undercurrent of something serious and sobering.  It’s as if the artists fear the audience won’t be interested in anything meaty unless it’s under a thick frosting of funny; or perhaps, conversely, their comic shtick won’t win any awards unless it’s edged with social significance. Or maybe both.

The upshot of this Fringe formulation in “The First 3 Minutes of 17 Shows” is that I’m left wanting more – certainly wanting to know more about Abby Wambaugh, who tells us she has other children and moved from Brooklyn to Copenhagen and is nonbinary. How, when, why?  The good news is that this makes me eager for whatever she does next.

The First 3 Minutes of 17 Shows w
Dixon Place through October 25
Running time: 65 minutes, no intermission
Tickets:$33 – $55
Written and performed by Abby Wambaugh
Directed by Lara Ricote
Lighting design by Lariviere