Lauren Weedman has spent decades transforming the humiliations, confusions, and emotional wreckage of her life into solo theater. Her latest accolade may require a little transformation of its own. “Now I’m an Emmy nominee,” Weedman says, with comic solemnity. “Before the Emmy nominee thing happened, people were saying, ‘Let’s have lunch.’”
Weedman—recently nominated for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for playing Mayor Jo Pezzimenti on HBO’s “Hacks”—brings her new one-woman show, “I Want the Best for You,” to Park Theater Hudson on August 29 at 8pm. It’s an evolving piece about aging, loneliness, family, community, and the slippery distance between saying you care about someone and actually showing up for them.
The title can express love, Weedman says, but also control, condescension, or “the emptiness of saying something like that.” Its origins lie partly in her two decades in Los Angeles, where the familiar invitation to get lunch frequently turns out to be a ceremonial exchange with no meal attached. “If I say it, I usually don’t want to leave people hanging, because what if it does mean something to them?” she says. “I’m kind of starved for kindness.”
Weedman enjoys solitude. She writes, paints, and spends plenty of time in her own head. But somewhere along the way, she says, the isolation “started turning against me.” The more successful she became, the more alone she sometimes felt.
That success includes recurring roles on “Hacks” and “Abbott Elementary,” along with appearances in “Looking,” “Euphoria,” “Sirens,” and “The Daily Show.” The Emmy nomination has brought more attention and more work, although Weedman remains suspicious of turning celebrity into a sales pitch.
When enrollment lagged for the solo-theater workshop she will teach at Park Theater August 21-23, a friend suggested advertising that the instructor played the mayor of Las Vegas on “Hacks.” Weedman initially resisted. “No, no, no, no, no,” she recalls saying. “That’s not my brand.”
Then the Emmy nomination arrived. “I was like, go ahead and put ‘Emmy-nominated,’” she says. “Let’s get cheap.”
The theatrical engine of “I Want the Best for You” began with another dubious promotional opportunity: Weedman’s appointment as celebrity grand marshal of the Las Vegas Pride parade. The invitation came after an old boyfriend from high school suggested that participating in Pride events might help her reconnect with people. “He goes, ‘You’re an icon,’” Weedman recalls. “I’m like, ‘I’m not an icon. I would drive a nicer car.’”
The parade was rained out, but the trip gave Weedman the emotional center of the show. She wound up in a small gay bar watching organizers crown a Hungarian man who had escaped a country dangerous for LGBTQ people. Although the larger celebration had fallen apart, the organizers were determined to give him his moment. “They all took care of each other,” Weedman says. “By the time they were shooting these confetti bombs at this guy onstage in this tiny little bar, it was such a loving community.”
That experience brought her back to a subject that has followed her through more than 14 autobiographical solo shows: the search for family, especially among people living outside its conventional boundaries. “It’s like the Kurt Vonnegut thing—you always end up writing about the same thing,” she says. “It’s always about family and about how hard it is, at least for me, to really feel like, ‘Okay, my people.’”
The Hudson performance will capture the work while it is still being discovered. Weedman has performed versions of it only a handful of times. Although it now has a beginning, middle, end, and a clearer narrative journey, some of the evening remains fluid. In past performances, she has carried index cards onstage and decided in the moment which direction to follow. “I can usually feel it,” she says. “I have markers. I know where I’m going. But I wanted to try different beginnings, try different things.”
That looseness suits Weedman’s conversational style, in which emotional candor, self-interruption, and sudden comic detours tumble over one another. But she distinguishes her work from stand-up. Her solo pieces may include characters, music, dance, and theatrical invention alongside autobiography. “Finding the right world for the story to live in is the best,” she says. “There’s always music or dance or something that elevates it to theater, so it’s not just me talking. I’m not really a stand-up.”
She also needs what she calls “a fire in the belly” before committing to a subject. Once she considers a show finished, she rarely returns to it. “I Want the Best for You,” however, remains alive, unfinished, and close enough to its source material to surprise its creator.
Park Theater’s intimate scale makes it an especially fitting laboratory. “It’s an amazing space,” Weedman says. “It feels full, it has a nice vibe, and it’s the perfect amount of people.”
And should “Emmy nominee” help fill those seats, Weedman is prepared to live with that too.
Lauren Weedman performs “I Want the Best for You” at Park Theater Hudson on August 29 at 8pm. Tickets are $40.
