CABARET REVIEW : Dunford’s ‘Out Loud’ Offers Part of the Picture

Christine Dunford is a tall, straight, super-shiksa type with blue eyes, long blond hair and legs up to here--someone destined for show biz and the fashion layout. Just the type, along with the super-rich, that has become one of the last cynosures of a millennium closing out in whiplash frenzy.

In “Out Loud,” her one-woman show at LunaPark, it doesn’t take long to realize that Dunford has set up type in order to play against it, not necessarily to expose her characters as self-deluded fools or hypocrites (though there’s plenty of that), but as figures holding onto themselves, with varying degrees of success, in the middle of contemporary free-fall.

“Out Loud” portrays four women: Italian super-model Damiana; Gena, a Westchester teen-ager who’s an aspiring ballerina studying with the New York City Ballet; a crusty New York agent named Daisy; and a diffident college professor (“mollusks and invertebrates”) who has seen her last hope for a reason to get through the day--a love affair with a colleague--disappear while the specter of New York as a habitat for the criminally insane looms.

As a Juilliard grad and veteran of Joe Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival, Dunford has technique to burn. We catch Gena right on the cusp of ruin, where a coltish beauty is becoming a hard case, and understand exactly what has brought her there. Dunford’s professor is comically flustered in the manner of early Diane Keaton, but so vulnerable you want to put your arm around her--she too is on a cusp: the softness that precedes sorrow (the only portrayal where Dunford lets herself look pretty). Daisy is the least realized of the group, a dead-eyed lizard, wreathed in cigarette smoke, whose sour expression suggests that the whole world stinks.

Dunford’s intuition shows us women who are not victims of men--that’s easy--but figures caught up like everyone else in the free market, media-zapped, centrifugal energies of our time.

Still, as a whole, “Out Loud” feels somewhat cursory and underdeveloped. Damiana comes out the most vivid of the lot, an arrogant Eurotrash scarecrow bristling with ridiculous opinions (“If Jesus Christ is the most perfect man, models are the same thing”) who talks to the world through a bank of steadicams. She could be a hologram. Nobody would be the wiser.

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n LunaPark, 665 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 652-0611. Thursdays at 8 p.m. $10. Ends Feb. 23.