A New Clown Comes to Town

The woman in The Woman on the Edge may not recognize herself when she looks in the mirror, but she can explain everything there is to know about Apollo 13 — both the 1970 space mission and 1995 film — with perfect clarity. Slathered in sparkles and drifting about the stage on her tippy toes, she lists the component parts of the Apollo spacecraft, detailing the respective functions of the command, lunar, and service modules. She goes on to explain the complex technicalities behind Mission Control’s plan to bring the crew safely home, in an accent that slides between transatlantic bombshell, Blanche Dubois, and Ingmar Bergman character.

“In old dramas and films, there’s always this woman who is on the verge of a nervous breakdown and she can’t do anything,” explains Elf Lyons, the show’s star and creator. So she made sure to make her protagonist different. “I hate that stereotype of a woman who’s not capable.”

The Woman on the Edge is the 13th solo show from Lyons, a British comic, director, and clown. It comes to the SoHo Playhouse via Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it received 28 five-star reviews, making the 35-year-old the most well-reviewed artist to ever show at the festival. This current run — which has been extended to November 8 — marks the comic’s New York stage debut, a milestone she discussed with me recently.

“The truth of the Woman on the Edge character is that she was the world I was living in. I was on the precipice, unbalanced, but still managing,” Lyons says. “I was still being a horse.”

Lyons isn’t being metaphorical about that last bit. Last spring, while touring Australia with her award-winning show Horses, Lyons and her fiancé broke up, a mere couple months before the wedding — and it happened via WhatsApp. Unmoored and devastated, on the other side of the world from her friends and family (hence the Apollo theme), Lyons still managed to get up onstage every night to play a sweet-tempered horse named Treacle.

Feeling like she was “on the other side of the moon,” Lyons finished her tour and quickly jet off to Thailand with a rebound lover, a fellow clown. After a two-week fling and an emotional good-bye at the Bangkok airport, Lyons knew that these surreal episodes would make the foundation of her next show. She started working on The Woman on the Edge — and she also started rewatching Apollo 13 a lot.

“It’s always been my favorite film, and I’d always cry, but after the breakup, it was a different kind of crying. I thought, What is it that I’m so drawn to?” Lyons says. “It’s about that fear of being so far away from my family and having to do that all on my own and be really brave, while I had all these people I loved on my phone helping me get through it — my mission control.”

The show’s text originates from an improvised preview Lyons performed a couple of weeks after returning from Bangkok, in which her “woman on the edge” (a Vertigo- and Persona-inspired character she had created before the breakup) tries to tell Elf’s story, in between phone calls from her needy husband, Pagliacci. The text now is basically the same, plus a few more anecdotes, elements of verbatim theater (voice notes from herself and friends and family), opera, and, of course, spacecrafts.

Ultimately, it’s the story of Lyons’s journey back to herself. The work has been described as her most autobiographical yet, which Lyons doesn’t quite understand. “A lot of my work is very autobiographical, but because I do it in terms of horses or birds or swans, people don’t view that as being real autobiography. But this one, you tell them the facts, and they go, ‘Oh, this one’s really autobiographical!’” 

While the show is personal, Lyons doesn’t believe in working through one’s problems onstage. She’s more interested in the audience, finding elements of her story that they can connect with. Sometimes that takes the form of a jaunty opera, with Lyons swinging about the stage like a gremlin. That scene, Lyons explains, comes from her commitment to Bouffon, a comic genre she studied at École Philippe Gaulier (the same famed theater and clowning school where Sacha Baron Cohen, among others, learned the technique). “The Bouffon is the dark clown. The idea is that you hold a mirror up to hypocrites and their bad behavior, so they can see themselves.” 

The show creates space for other types of buffoonery as well. During every performance, Lyons invites a random male audience member onstage, instructing him to read a prepared monologue aloud while she lip-syncs along. If executed correctly, the effect is that of a man putting words in a woman’s mouth. In the performance I attended, however, the volunteer had gone rogue, ignoring Lyons’s instructions and adding new words to the script, hamming it up for the audience. 

Lyons gamely played along with the man’s flubs and flourishes, until she finally had to pause the bit and correct him. “He was a bit of a Pagliacci,” Lyons sighs. “But even if it’s really uncomfortable, it still makes my point. It’s a man who’s not listening to a woman.” 

Though Lyons’s clownish sensibilities are central to The Woman on the Edge, the show isn’t purely clown, integrating other forms and techniques, from contemporary dance to film reenactment. For Lyons, clowning is just one among a number of tools she enlists to craft and shape her story. “Clowning is that reactivity and playfulness. When I drop something, I go, ‘Look what you made me do.’ It shows that glint in my eye,” Lyons says. “Like, I’m in charge. You don’t need to worry about me. Really.”

Though far from home, Lyons has established some satellites of support in New York already. One of her best clown friends, Damien Warren-Smith, is in town with his own Fringe export, and the two have been shouting-out each other’s shows from their respective stages. The morning of our meeting, Lyons posted on Instagram that she was losing her voice; under an hour later, another friend was at her door, bearing remedies.

Rogue Pagliaccis aside, Lyons finds the response to The Woman on the Verge in New York heartening, especially as the show connects with the women in the crowd. She describes the show’s climactic monologue: “That bit in the end, I’m just looking at women in the audience. I’m delivering it straight to them. I do get emotional, because I can see people getting emotional. You look at everyone, and everyone’s a 7-year-old. Everybody just wants someone to dance with them at a party.”