The First 3 Minutes of 17 Reveals, Abby Wambaugh titles her fringe debut. It’s a catchy idea, and as our host wheels via the primary handful of her 17 openings, the enjoyable is in imagining the full-length reveals every implies. However the gimmick wouldn’t maintain if it weren’t revealed as a smokescreen for one thing richer, regarding a painful private expertise that the present, and Wambaugh’s standup profession, exists partly to redeem.
As directed by Lara Ricote, The First 3 Minutes (for which Wambaugh has been nominated for a greatest newcomer award) is a masterpiece of development, an anthology of dotty inventive concepts that resolves into an affecting story of the comedian’s miscarriage, and of the worth of beginnings that by no means attain a center and an finish. However you received’t see that coming as we start, with Wambaugh impersonating a vacuum cleaner, then delivering two variations on autobiographical standup, introducing our host as non-binary, a Denmark resident and a mum. The following “first three minutes”, within the model of New York storytelling membership The Moth, recounts Wambaugh’s expertise of first discovering she was pregnant, 11 years in the past.
Is a narrative cohering? Not fairly but: the format permits Wambaugh to reset over and once more. There are some larky interactive stunts – comically so-so, however useful in constructing viewers rapport. There’s a prop-comedy skit dressed as a banana, then a scene for numerology followers in character because the digit 9. Even these narrative outliers are later retrofitted, thoughts you, to yield emotional significance, as – by the use of a send-up of the essayist David Sedaris – Wambaugh discloses her expertise of shedding a child 4 years in the past.
It’s a heart-on-sleeve second, however offset with bittersweet comedy as Wambaugh remembers the non-public encounters that restored her post-trauma. The present strikes on too, through a riff on the Mel Gibson film What Ladies Need that joyfully defuses the stress. Maybe Wambaugh then over-articulates the heartwarming ethical on the finish of a narrative that’s already performed that work for her. However this stays a beautiful debut, a young story of loss and restoration within the eye-catching guise of a high-concept comedy experiment.
