Right Here, Right Now

TYPO POSITIVE: Eddie Izzard gets <i>Sexie</i>, not sexy, on his latest tour.

TYPO POSITIVE: Eddie Izzard gets Sexie, not sexy, on his latest tour.

Eddie Izzard is a man of many moments.

by Sam Adams

Actors often talk about being "in the moment," but a single moment isn't enough to contain the mercurial comedy of Eddie Izzard. He'll wander into the Spanish Inquisition, pop into Nazi Germany, take tea in the Death Star's canteen, then grab a seat at the birth of the universe -- and at every stage, he's a part of the action. Hitler has been called worse things than a "genocidal fuckhead," but Izzard's present-tense aggravation makes you feel like he's just spotted the deceased madman across a crowded bar.

Izzard may be the only standup comedian to work entirely in the medium of digression. His stream-of-consciousness stage act often seems as if it's being made up on the spot, which isn't far from the truth. It's all been made up on some stage, somewhere. Although he's developed a kind of abstract fascination with structure -- keen enough for him to take screenwriting guru Robert McKee's famed story seminar -- each evening's show remains an entirely fluid creation. Izzard has tried experimenting with more conventional means of writing, but it didn't seem to take. Sometimes, I'm talking away, and I'll go into something, and I think, ¹Ah! That's quite a nice angle. I should talk about this [onstage].' I try to write it down, and I quite often forget.

Even during a brief phone interview, Izzard's free-associative tendencies come to the fore. His Sexie tour, which comes to the Merriam Nov. 4 to 8, has stopped in Minneapolis, and Izzard wonders aloud about the origins of the city's name, eventually deciding that there must be, somewhere, a sister city named Mickeyapolis. (No one said they were all keepers.)

If this makes Izzard sound like a bit of a scatterbrain, don't be fooled. The master-planning performer has a hand in every aspect of his show, from stage design to costuming to the typeface on the new DVD of Circle, his previous show. His eye for detail is matched by a career drive more intense than you might expect from such a seemingly easygoing chap. When Izzard found out that Sexie's San Francisco promoter had booked him in the same theater as his previous visit, Izzard balked at even the appearance of treading water. I told him, ¹It's got to be bigger,' and then I thought, that doesn't work -- there's going to come a point where you can't get any bigger. So I think it's always got to be different, at least. (More to Izzard's liking: the jump to the Broadway-sized Merriam from the tiny Painted Bride.)

Given the ever-changing nature of Izzard's show, asking for a synopsis is useless. Even the title is arbitrary. It could be called Elbow, he explains, giving what's obviously a stock answer. It just seemed more sexy to call it Sexie. Though Izzard has been dressing in drag onstage (and off) for years, and his transvestism figured heavily in his early material, the subject of sex is one he's rarely broached, and, title notwithstanding, not one he's likely to tackle this time around -- though he's open to suggestions. At first, he categorically dismisses the idea -- I'm not gonna go and do dick jokes -- but his resolve seems to weaken as the wheels start turning. I don't know if I've heard that much interesting sex material -- and I would be happy to talk about it. A pause. Maybe I should talk about it more

One thing Izzard does promise to talk about: breasts, just cause I'm a fan of breasts. So much a fan, in fact, that he's now sporting a synthetic pair, a practice that began when he tried on the stunt breasts used by Uma Thurman's body double on The Avengers. Izzard seems particularly attached to his new, slightly bigger pair. They follow me around -- they're my own personal breasts.

Though Izzard, whose acting has enlivened many an otherwise iffy movie, nurses a desire to initiate film projects, his own ambitions have stayed his hand; he'd rather wait for a hole-in-one thing than push through a half-baked project. (Idolizing Baz Luhrmann doesn't help.) Other aspirations aside, though, Izzard lauds standup as a very pure creative medium -- you tend to get more points the truer it gets. But truth, as we know, isn't always pretty. I have this theory that all comedians develop comedy as a social tool, and then it becomes a professional tool, and you stop using it as a professional tool, Izzard ventures. That's where the sullen comedian thing comes from. So you actually need to bring it back into your social life. It's good to joke around with people. A lot of us stop doing it, and then we go back to being the boring bastards that we were before we started doing comedy.

Eddie Izzard, Tue.-Sat., Nov. 4-8, 8 p.m., $30-$50, Merriam Theater, 250 S. Broad St., 215-336-2000.