One-Man Symphony

There was a scene in Ahamefule J. Oluo’s 2014 show, Now I’m Fine, that’ll probably stay with me for the rest of my life. Warning: It’s kinda gross.

Oluo stands on stage with a handful of musicians behind him and describes a ghastly disease he had in his twenties that caused his skin to dissolve. After treatment, as his skin began to regrow, he found that his lips would be scabbed shut when he woke up every morning—whereupon he’d have to manually pry them open, sometimes with tools. During the scene in question, Oluo brings out a large piece of posterboard with a simple line drawing of a closed mouth on it, then proceeds to cut between the lips with a pair of scissors: his daily routine.

I think about this constantly. Oluo had taken something that was certainly miserable to endure, a grim topic that’s gotta be upsetting to think about, and pared it down to something totally fucking ridiculous, just so he could relate the experience effectively to a crowd of strangers. He’d elicited empathy via absurdity, with a prop joke. Also, oh my god, what if you had to cut your lips apart with scissors every morning?

The guy has a real knack for telling a horrifying story in an affable way. He’s funny too, of course—he spent years working in stand-up comedy—but maybe more importantly, the way he frames these stories is just so deeply relatable. In his easy, chatty way, Oluo makes you feel like you too have suffered from a bizarre skin disease that forced you to cut your sealed lips apart every morning, and that you lived through it together. Ain’t life a bitch.

That knack is back in The Things Around Us, Oluo’s third in a performance trilogy—with the second being 2020’s Susan, a tribute to his mom. Intiman Theatre is producing the final piece of his theatrical triptych in a ten-performance run at the Broadway Performance Hall, adjacent from the company’s new-ish home at Seattle Central College. While the first two installments featured Oluo soloing on trumpet before a full jazz band, he’s alone on the stage now, manning all the instruments himself. The format is the same as the last two productions, though: Oluo vacillates between telling us anecdotes from his life and then scoring them, with the spoken parts being part monologue and part stand-up.

This time, the theme is about changing one’s mind, finding out that your assumptions were wrong, seeing something from a fresh angle, and finding patterns in chaos. A casual friend whom Oluo always thought was cool reveals that they’ve been aligned with an enemy for decades, and possibly with good reason. Someone who he believed was definitely dead turns out to have been resurrected, against all odds. He had big ideas for his 30th birthday during a trip overseas, but Norway had other, somewhat macabre plans. Race, the COVID-19 pandemic, the darker sides of being alive in the world, and the pros and cons of doing it in a fragile meatsuit of a vehicle are common leitmotifs here too. Oluo punctuates his stories with instrumentals on trumpet and clarinet and also accompanies himself with his own percussion tracks, using loop pedals to record himself drumming on everyday objects like cardboard boxes, playing chimes, tapping an egg shaker, snapping, or lightly beatboxing. Compiling shades of experimental jazz, Nigerian hi-life, trance music, and new music, the complicated soundtrack is all done live.

It’s tempting to focus on Oluo’s great skill on the trumpet, the instrument we’ve associated with him over the years, but the loop pedal is a big part of what makes The Things Around Us so engaging. He’s multitracking live, before our eyes, building three or four layers of trumpet one by one, and then harmonizing with the stack he’s just made. The drum tracks are even more complex, and it’s hard to believe he executed every beat in this lush, EDM-like loop right before us, by hand, just seconds ago. The mellifluous horn lines he plays over the percussion track are pretty catchy too—the flavors melding and complementing one another as he assembles the musical lasagna. It sounds so goooood.

In addition to the killer music and the introspective story-jokes, Oluo is eminently funny and sharp, and he’s good at being believably himself too, not a wacky stage character. Being super funny is enough by itself to win the room, but Oluo ingratiates himself by wielding his vulnerability as a tool, à la improvisational comedy. He’s also utilizing his skills as a comedian with some strong crowd work, itself a form of improv, as is his use of loopers and building musical scores in real time.

“Raise your hands if you can think of someone you never want to run into in public,” Oluo prompts the crowd, when listing the pros and cons of living in locked-down, height-of-the-pandemic Seattle. When he elicits laughs from a dated reference, he calls out the elder millennials and shoots a knowing glance. Granted, this show isn’t exactly stand-up, but it’s still a hue of observational comedy, so that trick comes in handy. His skilled crowd work reminds the audience that we're all leading overlapping lives here. And it works—everyone’s rapt and present. He’s got ’em.

The theme that united all three shows—and perhaps everything Oluo does?—is finding the joke in the tragedy, or just in the bleak desperation that life sometimes clobbers us with. It’s less about making lemonade out of lemons with Oluo, and more just taking the piss out of the lemons.

Speaking of bodily fluids, I missed seeing Susan during its run at the Paramount Theater, due to that weird thing that happened in the spring of 2020, so I’ll never know if there was a mentally indelible cutting-paper-lips-apart–type scene in that show, but the one in The Things Around Us that will stick with me for the next decade is the opener. At the top of the show, Oluo very vividly describes an agonizing process of clearing out his sinuses, again during a long sickness. I won't ruin the punch; suffice it to say that it's disgusting, but whew, have you ever been there. Way to make the crowd see snot rockets in a new light.

With an ability to move seamlessly between improv, storytelling, and live musical performance on multiple instruments simultaneously, this guy’s in a class by himself. Seattle shouldn’t miss the chance to catch the show during its relatively short run, where once again, Oluo will captivate the crowd with music, then knock ‘em dead—and make it all look easy.

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The Things Around Us runs through May 4 at Intiman Theatre. Buy tickets here.