Theater preview
Colin Quinn
8 p.m., Oct. 19
$40
14th Street Playhouse
173 14th Street N.E., Atlanta
www.14thstplayhouse.org, 404-733-5000
Colin Quinn has made frequent visits to the Punchline Comedy Club over the years, offering locals his sardonic observations with his patented New York accent and swagger.
Now the former “Saturday Night Live” fake news anchor is moving into the theater world by landing his one-man show about the Constitution at the 14th Street Playhouse in Midtown. It’s dubbed “Unconstitutional.”
And no, this is not a dry dissertation about America’s august 226-year-old document. Rather, he uses the four-page document as fodder to riff about America as it was and how it is today, with pop culture references thrown in for good measure. That means you, Kardashians!
Quinn, in an interview last week, said he was inspired to do a show about the Constitution because people cite it all the time but many have never read it or have a full understanding of its contents.
“It’s a brilliant document to an extent,” Quinn said. “But it also leaves a lot of room for free will and for individual rights. It’s amazing and terrible at the same time. Taken to its logical conclusion, you can’t deal with everyone’s individual rights. That can’t be done to everyone’s satisfaction.”
He said the system that tries to please everybody “is very noble. It’s also a noble failure.”
Reviews of his show have been positive, likening him to “the best college history professor that you never had” (The Hollywood Reporter) and “the coolest high school teacher ever.” (Theater Mania).
Quinn’s parents were teachers. “I was obviously genetically predisposed to it,” he said. “But growing up, I was just this [bleeped] up kid. I never finished college. I did a horrible job in school. It’s almost impossible to get booted from a state school, but I still got booted. Now I’m interested in history. I love doing this stuff now.”
He is happy to do a 70-minute show in “teaching mode” but can’t imagine how he could do it every day six hours a day. “I’m fine for an hour,” Quinn said. “Teachers do six shows a day and they start at 9 a.m. I don’t know how they do it!”
He updates the show in each city based on the news, so there is no doubt the partial government shutdown will come up. “It’s bad for our morale,” he said. “It’s bad for our sense of our system. The system is not going to work if anybody can do this any time.”
Quinn also said every bit of breaking news now becomes fodder: “I’ve become that idiot where I now see everything through the lens of the Constitution.”
Like many congressman, he kept a copy of the Constitution in his pocket for three weeks, but then he trashed it. “It’s actually pretty boring,” he said. “I got sick of it.”
Quinn did his one-man show in Toronto and got a good reception. “I loved it up there. Canadians are nicer people. They’re better human beings than we are. But we Americans gave people hope. There’s something to be said for that. We have that spirit. Ultimately, if it doesn’t work and collapses, we gave people a nice show for a couple of hundred years!”
The New York Times review of his show complained that he didn’t offer much of a solution to the problems we face. He took the critique as constructive. “I wrote a new ending,” he said. “I hate to say it, but that son of a [bleep] was right. Now the ending is stronger.”
