Anyone who believes author Thomas Wolfe’s adage, “You can’t go home again,” never witnessed stand-up comedian, illustrator and multimedia artist Max Wittert’s ‘I Can Steal Your Mother.’
Its speedily hilarious, yet poignant stage-study of a Los Angeles’ upbringing from the mind of a current Brooklynite, ‘I Can Steal Your Mother’ promises be absurdly humorous and perfect for PhilaMOCA.
“Illustration is a solitary act,” says Wittert of drawing lines and curves in school in Brooklyn, after leaving his longtime home on the West Coast. “You work on it by yourself. You delver it by yourself. The only time you meet other illustrators is at comic conventions where they only wish to be alone.”
Alone, however, wasn’t for the community-minded Wittert, who began shifting his attention to his other love, stand-up comedy, and its weird-world iteration within Williamsburg’s alt-comedy scene. “That scene was just people doing weird stuff to make each other laugh.”
Performing with a laptop, sitting alongside projections of his elegantly odd drawings, Wittert hit upon a signature—a public performative vibe that touched on gods, monsters, and matters of fashion and style — “I did a lot of drag on paper… thought of clothes as inhabiting something other than yourself” — based, in part, on his mother’s work as a Hollywood stylist.
“There’s an awareness of Los Angeles and home that I didn’t recognize in my work until I left,” he says of a newly-found obsession defined by the Hollywood dream machine of its television and film industries. “I think Los Angeles is the heart of the country, people sense that, and get upset because they like to believe where they live is that center… Also, Los Angeles is inscrutable, still the Wild West in its sprawl and variable nature. LA is not user-friendly, and therefore, elusive – a city so constantly in hiding despite being always on display.”
That doesn’t sound funny, and yet, all that tension – in combination with his childhood love of the goddesses of Greek mythology, of the powers of The X-Men, of being a young gay man, and the pain of losing his mother to brain cancer at age 4 — gathers steam, and comes to a hard, frothy head in ‘I Can Steal Your Mother’.
“I used to invent my own goddesses all the time because the pantheon that existed was insufficient,” he says with a laugh, having given his femme creatures “outlandish powers and squabbles” that could never exist. “Throughout ‘I Can Steal Your Mother’, I act as a chorus within the show’s three-episode arc, the conflicts they’re having, and the issues between the Goddess of Death, and a package of hers coming from Amazon that has gone missing.”
Mocking the grandiosity of goddesses that the 7-year-old Wittert thought might be cool is how this illustrator-comedian gets his kicks in the present day. Death and grief looms large, too, in this staged comic narrative-with-pictures, giving Wittert a sharp, tart edge.
“Having time to feel death and feel grief… these things don’t disappear from who you are once you experience it: they inhabit every element of who I am, and not always in obvious ways. It’s a ripple effect of how those things play out. So, a lot of ‘I Can Steal Your Mother’ is about the negative space of someone being gone, of thinking of a life as a marble slab, and its story only coming for once the marble has been chipped away. It’s how through loss, I have been able to define a little bit what my life looks like.”
‘I Can Steal Your Mother’ hits the stage at PhilaMOCA on Thursday, Sept. 12, at 8 p.m. For information and tickets, visit philamoca.org
