The First 3 Minutes of 17 Shows, Abby Wambaugh titles her fringe debut. It’s a catchy concept, and as our host wheels through the first handful of her 17 openings, the fun is in imagining the full-length shows each implies. But the gimmick wouldn’t sustain if it weren’t revealed as a smokescreen for something richer, relating to a painful personal experience that the show, and Wambaugh’s standup career, exists in part to redeem.
As directed by Lara Ricote, The First 3 Minutes (for which Wambaugh has been nominated for a best newcomer award) is a masterpiece of construction, an anthology of dotty creative ideas that resolves into an affecting story of the comic’s miscarriage, and of the value of beginnings that never reach a middle and an end. But you won’t see that coming as we begin, with Wambaugh impersonating a vacuum cleaner, then delivering two variations on autobiographical standup, introducing our host as non-binary, a Denmark resident and a mum. The next “first three minutes”, in the style of New York storytelling club The Moth, recounts Wambaugh’s experience of first discovering she was pregnant, 11 years ago.
