Even if you were only remotely involved in the making of Don’t Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde’s sophomore film as director whose behind-the-scenes brouhaha has dominated the past month’s show business news cycle, there was no escaping the memes and mockery. Unless you were Kate Berlant, who can be seen at the beginning of the film’s trailer wearing a cream-colored trapeze dress and balancing a cocktail on her head, and who dodged the withheld-eye-contact and spit allegations. Berlant has been too busy staging her brilliant one-woman show at the Connelly Theater in New York’s East Village.
The putatively autobiographical Kate is a dazzling hall of mirrors, a head-spinning exploration of narcissism, main character syndrome and our culture’s insatiable appetite for trauma. It’s also an undeniable celebration of Berlant’s Big Brain Energy. Before she was a cult comedian, Berlant was a graduate student at NYU, reading Lacan and Derrida and hanging out with the sorts of self-important scholars she would go on to parody in her own work, from the woman with the artistic face tattoo who calls listening to public radio “my space that I curated for myself to be well” to the performance artist who collaborates with a parrot that Berlant created for the Netflix series Characters. “She revolutionized space, and what it is to take up space,” Jemima Kirke, a fellow art world brat (Berlant’s father is the collage artist Tony Berlant), tells the camera in perfect mockumentary deadpan.
