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.
Is a story cohering? Not quite yet: the format allows Wambaugh to reset over and again. There are some larky interactive stunts – comically so-so, but helpful in building audience rapport. There’s a prop-comedy skit dressed as a banana, then a scene for numerology fans in character as the digit 9. Even these narrative outliers are later retrofitted, mind you, to yield emotional significance, as – by way of a send-up of the essayist David Sedaris – Wambaugh discloses her experience of losing a baby four years ago.
It’s a heart-on-sleeve moment, but offset with bittersweet comedy as Wambaugh recalls the personal encounters that restored her post-trauma. The show moves on too, via a riff on the Mel Gibson movie What Women Want that joyfully defuses the tension. Perhaps Wambaugh then over-articulates the heartwarming moral at the end of a story that’s already done that work for her. But this remains a lovely debut, a tender tale of loss and recovery in the eye-catching guise of a high-concept comedy experiment.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 26 August
