Get a Rise, and a Laugh, from The Accidental Pervert
-Amanda Scarpone, BroadwayWorld.com
Review Of "The Accidental Pervert"
- Ethan Kanfer, Show Business Weekly
Welcome to the pervert's house
-Eric C. Markowitz, Washington Square News
Theater Review: The Accidental Pervert
-Jon Sobel, Blogcritics
The Interview: Andrew Goffman, playwright/performer
-Tien Mao, gothamist
Actor's Love of Porn Inspires 'Pervert' Play
-Jeff Feinman, Queens Tribune
Get a Rise, and a Laugh, from The Accidental Pervert by AMANDA SCARPONE (BroadwayWorld.com)
Enough praise cannot be given for Andrew Goffman’s brilliant performance of The Accidental Pervert. Hilarious and horrifying at the same time, this one-man show is altogether eye opening in the best of ways!
The Accidental Pervert, which began as part of Goffman’s comedy act, had previously been performed throughout various clubs on the comedy circuit. Under the direction of Charles Messina, Goffman learns to transform his routine from a series of jokes into a story set within a specific framework. With ease, you can recognize how random jokes melted away into an actor’s internal dialogue with a solid plot containing a cohesive beginning, middle and conclusion. You can tell that Goffman comes from a comedic background because although he still seems a little “rough around the edges” he is clearly confident alone on stage carrying the show with ease. Goffman literally puts himself out on the line with the most brutally honest yet endearing story to tell, hoping the audience will laugh. If his jokes don’t “get a rise” out of the audience, execution and direction alone cannot be blamed. The Accidental Pervert is a performance of Goffman reliving his life. If no one is laughing, it’s because the audience doesn’t find the humor in his non-fictional story. And the experiences Goffman shares with us on stage is the nitty gritty part of life; there isn’t anything pretty about it. For an actor to do that, it shows a great deal of courage and confidence for taking the risk and believing you can make the material work.
The Accidental Pervert takes the audience on a biographical tour of Goffman’s life from age 11 onward. Goffman explains while clearly trying to win the audience’s sympathy that no one “starts out wanting to be a pervert,” yet things happen that clearly change the result of that sentiment. Goffman claims that his addiction to pornography was the result of him accidentally stumbling upon his father’s collection which sent him into a mindset from which he never returned. As Goffman explains the incident, you can see the innocence melting away in front of your face. “You don’t think of your dad having sex,” Goffman says with puppy dog eyes, “excitement to him is like a good steak, but not sex.” The incident leaves Goffman with a vast collection of emotions from fear to humiliation to confusion to being intrigued to being excited. From this point on, Goffman enters a world where sex, pornography and masturbation are rulers of his universe. They are the most important elements to his days and they creep into his every conscious moment.
What’s fun to note is that I was witnessing all this from a female perspective. Yeah, I grew up with an older brother and I’ve lived with male roommates, so I obviously thought I was somewhat knowledgeable about this “fact” of malehood. Well let me take this moment to admit I was fully misunderstood. Although being a woman in this case didn’t allow me to have a truly relatable advantage, I was still shocked nonetheless by what Goffman said. The first thing out his mouth was that he started masturbating when he was 11. While some of the men in the audience chuckled, all I could think was, “My God? That young?” Goffman explained that by the time he entered high school, he had watched so many adult movies, that his obsession grew. After four years of an intense pornography regime, it just wasn’t good enough anymore to watch. In a complete contradiction, Goffman says he, “needed the real thing; he had to have the fantasy.” I never had the perspective of a 15-year-old boy with raging hormones thrown so directly in my face before. I presume that I come from a bit of a conservative background and although I’ve always accepted that people had sex at 15, I always thought it was still a bit on the young side. But now, understanding the back-story to why the hormones are raging in teen boys that age, I almost think it’s a necessity. Goffman had the power with his words and dare I say it, actions, to cause me to think for a moment. He forced me to broach the subject through another perspective and I’m glad he did. He gave me a chance to view things about a topic that far too many men, for good reason, will never get into with women.
The audience watches as Goffman grows up, explaining through comedy how pornography factors into every aspect of his life and how it shapes his perspective of women. He admits that he saw women as objects and never felt the need to get to know them. Sex was the ultimate goal and he could easily get women to let their guard down with alcohol in order to achieve his pornographic vision. His perspective however eventually changes upon meeting his future wife. He recalls that she was the first time he ever wanted the sex to be “special” and that he didn’t mind waiting for that moment. He and his wife Maria, eventually have a daughter which presents Goffman with a new pair of eyes to view the world. He finds through her, the innocence that accidentally left him as an 11 year-old boy and leads him to embrace his world, and his daughter’s, with renewed spirit and vision.
So maybe a little bit of my innocence was ruined on this night as well. However, in retrospect, I’m glad it did; there are worse ways to find out about the habits of our lovable men. Instead, Goffman takes us on a wild roller coaster ride of emotions starting at disgust and ending at acceptance. Never too heavy, but always completely over the top, The Accidental Pervert will “bring you to your knees” as the best PR that the male race could ever want.
The Accidental Pervert is playing at the Triad Theater on West 72nd Street between Broadway and Columbus through February 24th. Performances are Thursdays and Fridays at 7pm. Please call 212-868-4444 or visit www.SmartTix.com for tickets.
top
Review Of "The Accidental Pervert"
by Ethan Kanfer Show Business Weekly
In The Accidental Pervert, a brisk, energetic one-man show, comedian Andrew Goffman tracks his transformation from a horny young boy to a mature man (though equally horny). The coming-of-age-in-suburbia story is a familiar one, but Goffman’s engaging personality and unusual narratives add just enough freshness to make the journey worthwhile.
Young Andrew grows up in a small Pennsylvania town and enjoys a loving, wholesome relationship with his family. Until his folks divorce, that is. Although his dad remains close, Andrew misses having him in the house. Poring over the things his father left behind, the lad comes across an unexpected treasure: a box of X rated videotapes. With his mom away at work, Andrew often has the house to himself, and the basement becomes his private screening room.
While other boys might choose Superman as an alter ego, Goffman becomes Andrew Third Leg. His fantasies are a helpful coping mechanism, but real life isn’t always so fulfilling. Relationships and dating for Andrew prove difficult in high school, as come-ons inspired by porno dialogue fail to resonate with the cheerleaders. As an adult, Andy goes through a playboy phase, then falls in love and marries the girl of his dreams. He’s ecstatic at the prospect of raising a family, but soon learns that having a baby means months without sex. Is it moral for a young father to revisit his stash of X-rated epics while his daughter naps in the next room?
Although the pace slackens in the show’s later scenes, The Accidental Pervert provides an ample showcase for Goffman’s unflagging comic energy and strangely endearing man child persona. The transformations are remarkable, with young Andrew subtly changing his voice and body as he fumbles through each phase of life. Although it feels spontaneous, it’s clear that Goffman and director Charles Messina worked hard to handle a (literally) touchy subject tastefully. There’s nothing accidental about the craftsmanship of this funny and tender personal confession.
top
Welcome to the pervert's house
by Eric C. Markowitz Washington Square News
“The Accidental Pervert”
Triad In his parents’ bedroom, in the privacy of their suburban Pennsylvania home, young Andrew Goffman began a lifelong obsession with pornography and sex. At the tender age of 11, rummaging through his father’s closet, Goffman discovered a cardboard box full of 86 videotapes with titles such as “Star Whores” and “Never So Deep.” Goffman would experience most of his adult life under porn’s penetrating influence. Filthy, intriguing and sometimes confusing pornography shaped his rather raunchy preteen understanding of sex.
Now 36 years old, a comedian and actor long over his obsession, Goffman recounts his life as a porn addict in his one-man-show “The Accidental Pervert” — revealing the smallest details of his obsession to the delight of his audience. He chronicles his triumph against his addiction and how he ultimately overcame the daily routine of Vaseline, tissues and fantasies.
The show is at times hilarious as he tells stories of throwing pencils or paper clips onto the floor just to snag a glimpse between the legs of his elementary school teacher. Nothing is sacred in “The Accidental Pervert.” Talking vaginas and kindergarten wet dreams are crowd favorites, but it doesn’t stop there. Recalling the first time he heard his parents having sex — before understanding what sex actually was — Goffman exclaims, “The only time I heard moaning like that was when grandma fell down the stairs!”
What is so refreshing about “The Accidental Pervert” is the brutal honesty with which Goffman tells his story. Everything he tells us seems perfectly candid and frank, not to mention completely irreverent and vulgar. Goffman leaves out nothing to save his dignity. His teenage fixation with the family’s robust 50-year-old black housemaid, for example, segues perfectly into his nymphomaniacal college relationship with a 50-year-old Italian woman with “hairy armpits and unpleasant breath.”
The play is really one long stand-up routine that Goffman keeps fresh through his flair for physical comedy, sprucing up the monotony inherent in any one-man show. There are at least three dance routines in which the lights are turned down and Goffman lets everything loose. He twists his T-shirt to pleasure himself during “The Twist,” but all of his sexual escapades come to a screeching halt when he meets his future wife, Maria.
Maria becomes the impetus for change, especially with the birth of Goffman’s first child — a daughter whom he cares for very affectionately. Toward the end, the performance takes a sentimental tone that doesn’t feel entirely appropriate, especially since it’s preceded by 60 minutes of explicit, self-deprecating sex jokes about boobs and butts and stuff I really can’t say without my editor shaking his head in disgust and pure mortification at how similarly he and Goffman think.
But the majority of Goffman’s act is outrageous in every sense of the word. For those who appreciate high-brow Broadway performances or pompous melodramatic off-Broadway “art” pieces, “The Accidental Pervert” may just be a tad too (what I’ll very casually refer to as) “progressive.” On the other hand, if your ideal form of entertainment is an episode of “Beavis and Butthead” followed by a screening of any Van Wilder movie, “The Accidental Pervert” is your Mecca of theater.
top
Theater Review: The Accidental Pervert
Improbable as it may sound, comedian/actor/writer Andrew Goffman and director Charles Messina have crafted a one-man play about a porn addict that's both heartily funny and genuinely touching. A veteran of the comedy circuit, the indefatigable and charmingly goofy Goffman transforms the stuff of standup into a lighthearted but rich piece of theater. Neither a glorified comedy routine nor a plotless character study, The Accidental Pervert is a real play, albeit with a cast of one.
Goffman handles his uncomfortable subject matter with ease, riding on a powerful voice, penetrating gaze, sweet-but-tough persona, and a comic's sense of timing. Aided by tightly integrated lighting and sound cues and cleverly placed props and clothing, he tells a twisted bildungsroman of a boy who compensates (after a fashion) for an absent father by immersing himself in said parent's abandoned collection of porn videos. Though not above generating inexpensive laughs with explicit raunchiness and porn-movie pun-titles, he threads the obvious humor into a moving and psychologically aware narrative of sexual awakening, dissipated youth, amorous adventures, true love, and finally marriage and parenthood. Enlivening the monologue with plenty of physical humor and stage business, he captures the audience and pretty much never lets go.
I say "pretty much" because there are isolated moments when the sheer weight of Goffman's task - carrying the whole story with only his own body and language - seems to get the better of him just a bit, so that a word or phrase is left detached from its context. Also, the last section of the play goes on a little too long, deviating from the overall succinctness. But such minor imperfections do not detract appreciably from this delightful and sparkling piece of work
top
The Interview: Andrew Goffman,
playwright/performer
By TIEN MAO
(originally in Gothamist)
Name, age, occupation, where do you live and where are you from?
My name is Andrew Goffman, I am 36, I live in Forest Hills, Queens. I grew up in Blue Ball, PA about 7 miles from Intercourse, about an hour outside of Philadelphia. I lived in a two-story house at a dead end on Woodcock Lane. I loved it. It was also when my parents were their happiest. They loved each other, and adored me and my big sister Jan. We were truly happy.
You’re in a one man show - 'The Accidental Pervert' - that you’ve also written about being an ex-porn addict? What exactly is your play about?
The play is about my early exposure to pornography and how it affected the way I viewed women, sex and myself. At the age of 11, I accidentally stumbled across my Dad’s collection of pornographic tapes one day while rummaging through his closet. My parents had divorced and he had moved out. So I started snooping through his old stuff. When I came across those tapes and watched them, I was shocked, horrified, intrigued, all of those things. The images in those films really left an indelible impression in my mind’s eye.
Do you remember what the first pornographic movie you watched was? What do you remember about that experience? Did you have a favorite movie/actress?
In the show, we’ve gone to great lengths to track down those films that were such a part of my youth, for authenticity’s sake. The very first time I watched porn, I was confused. I didn’t know what exactly I was seeing. But I was drawn in. I was hooked.
The first pornographic movie I ever saw was Gerard Damiano's classic sex comedy Never So Deep staring Loni Sanders. There was this character of a very cool rich guy who lived in a mansion where he hung out in silk pajamas all day and published a sex magazine. I didn’t know it at the time because I was eleven years old, but evidently the writers of this particular porno video had been inspired by the head honcho of playboy himself.
In the video, the Hugh Hefner character meets up with this amazing woman, who gives him the best blowjob of his entire life. Which is saying quite a bit because you get the impression this is the kind of guy who has sampled quite a few.
Only then the woman mysteriously disappears. And now Hugh –who has always been such a cool, debonair, love em and leave em kind of guy—is broken hearted and crazed. He has to find the woman. He can’t bear to go through the rest of his life without another blowjob like that.
So he hires a couple of private detectives and he sets them out on the mission to locate the amazing blowjob woman. They only have one clue: She has a tattoo on her butt of a duckbill platypus.
The two detectives search far and wide, naturally. For some reason I don’t remember, the only way they can find out if a woman might be the one they’re looking for is to get her into bed, so they do that a lot, together, in threesomes. At one point they even get excited, thinking they’ve found their girl, only it turns out the tattoo the man has just spotted is only the temporary kind. It gets stuck on his tongue. And anyway, it’s just a butterfly.
But there’s a happy ending. They find the girl with the real tattoo. They bring her back to the Hefner guy’s mansion. It turns out she really loved being with him too—she never gave anyone a blowjob before that liked it so much as he did, so everyone’s got what they wanted. Who says there are no happy endings?
How has your life changed because of and since your addiction to adult films?
Well, I think it affects you. I think it affects all men. Most men have their first encounter with sex through pornography. This is how many of us learn what sex is. And I think it is ultimately a miseducation. Then we have to re-learn everything to have normal sexual relationships with real women. So I think it’s a life long struggle. It’s amazing how many men begin to open up and tell their stories to me after they see the show.
How does acting in your show different that the comedy circuit, which you’ve toured on?
That is something that was a goal from day one. And something that director Charles Messina and I worked on extensively. Our goal was to create a dramatic play and not a stand up routine. While the show incorporates a good deal of my stand up material, it is now within the framework of a drama. It has a through-line, an arc. It’s not just random anecdotes or punch lines. It’s a story. My story. It is still very funny. At least I hope it is!
What place or thing would you declare a landmark?
The Triad Theater. Just Kidding.
What advice, if any, would you give to Mayor Bloomberg?
Nothing, the man is a genius and should be President. I hope he comes to see my show or at least checks out my website: www.TheAccidentalPervert.com
When you just need to get away from it all, where is your favorite place in NYC to be alone?
My bathroom. Kidding. Central Park
top
Actor’s Love of Porn Inspires ‘Pevert’ Play
By JEFF FEINMAN
(originally in the Queens Tribune)
The day he popped the videotape into the VCR was the day that Andrew Goffman’s life changed drastically. From the deep recesses of his father’s closet, the 11-year-old boy stumbled across the tape and watched in awe at what the unclothed people on the screen were doing in front of his eyes. That was the day Goffman had discovered pornography.
“It really affected me cause I never looked at women, sex, or my father in the same way again,” he said. “I thought these pornos were sort of reality. I remember when I would ask girls out on dates, I’d say ‘hey Susie, lets go out for ice cream and I’ll bring the whipped cream.”
As a tribute to one of his favorite pastimes, Goffman, now living in Forest Hills, has created a play called “The Accidental Pervert.” The play delves into the awkward, sleazy, and downright dirty corridors of his experiences with porn, brought forth with sincerity and humor. “The Accidental Pervert” will be performed Nov. 17 and Nov. 19 at the 45th Street Theatre in Manhattan.
The play is told in narrative form, with Goffman
occasionally stepping back in time to portray some of the prime characters in his young life, including his mother, father, and himself as an adolescent teen. The former stand-up comedian says that though there are many raunchy references in his play and maybe even a X-rated clip here and there, the performance also focuses on his coming of age as a mature adult.
“The show really touches on the humor of the subject,” said Goffman. “I think it’s a smarter, sophisticated way of approaching it. It’s an adult topic but the show isn’t sleazy or perverted. My hope for the show is that people can say ‘hey, this guy’s telling the truth,’ or that they can relate to it.”
Goffman said he feels that a major turnaround in his maturation into an adult came when he met his wife. If that didn’t have the full effect on him, he said, then having a daughter chipped away any residue of his former perverted self. When his daughter was born, his days as a stand-up comic, as well as his days as a porn addict, came to an end. “I am a good, responsible father now,” Goffman says. “I don’t even miss the tapes anymore.”
Things weren’t always so squeaky clean in his life.
Goffman said that though he never talked with his father about sex, the porno tapes in his father’s closet were a part of his sexual education. “Instead of teaching me to open the car door for girls on a date or the difference between a flathead and a Phillips screwdriver, he left me these tapes,” Goffman said with a laugh. “That was his legacy, I guess.”
As part of the Double Helix Theatre Company, Goffman’s play was one of only seven plays selected out of hundreds of applicants to receive a grant for production. Working with veteran Director Charles Messina, Goffman said that he was able to successfully transform his script into a well-tuned performance. Though there will be only two shows at the 45th Street Theatre, “The Accidental Pervert” will move to an off-Broadway venue in the winter of 2006.
More than anything though, he’s a happily married man and proud resident of Forest Hills. “I love Austin Street and I love taking my daughter to parks,” said Goffman. “Living right near the E or F train lets you go right into Manhattan. Being in Forest Hills feels like you’re in the suburbs and there’s nowhere else I want to be.”
The 45th Street Theatre is located at 354 W 45th St Call (212) 582-0241 for more information.
top
'The Accidental Pervert' runs from from February 2, 2006 to February 24, 2006 at The Triad Theater (158 West 72nd St.). 10% of the proceeds from the show will go to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids. You can purchase tickets to the show here or by calling 212-868-4444.
top