THEATER: CLAUDIA SHEAR’S DONE SOMETHING AMAZING WITH HER LIFE: SHE’S MADE A SHOW OF IT
MARC PEYSER
THE NEXT TIME YOU WAKE UP HATING your job, think about Claudia Shear. At last count, 31-year-old Shear has held 65 jobs, each at least as dead-end as “Wild Thing” Williams’s gig with the Phillies. She’s been a receptionist in a whorehouse, a burger flipper and the phone girl in a sales scam. She spent a year plying cosmetics at department-store counters and a day playing Mrs. Rip Van Winkle in the Brooklyn Bridge Centennial Parade (don’t laugh; she made 150 bucks). Her shortest job, in a restaurant with negligible tolerance for personal phone calls, lasted 10 minutes. Her most challenging was translating opera librettos from Italian to English. “My big theory was if you find something you really like, do that,” she says. But she never did until now.
Job number 65 is Shear’s tour-de-resume, a one-woman show called Blown Sideways Through Life, now playing off Broadway in New York. In just one bawdy, surprisingly moving hour, she takes us through jobs you never thought about before but will never forget. Part stand-up routine, part personal diary, “Blown Sideways” is more than just vivid proof of the RuPaul rule, “You better work.” Shear reminds us–using few props beyond sun-glasses, a door mounted like a table and an eight-inch platform shoe–that when you gotta work, do it on your own terms, with your own style. When she storms out on an abusive boss, she threatens to “slap you so hard your whole family is going to cry.” When she treads water for a few months at some greasy spoon, she makes sure to find time for lessons in French and fencing. “I’m not going to let the world of bosses and money rule my day,” she says. And in case her rapidfire Brooklynese obscures the can-do message, she ends job number 65 with a conga-juiced dance that is all flailing arms, swinging hips and unbridled joy at finding her place at last.
But amid the hilarious stories and the snippets of on-the-job shouting matches, it becomes clear that Shear did not enjoy getting blown sideways through the want ads. These jobs financed acting, voice, ballet, even juggling classes–anything to help a working-class, City University grad make it in her field of dreams: the theater. But at 5 feet 3 and 200-plus pounds (she’s much thinner now), she couldn’t even get agents to hold on to her audition photo. “I’ve been really fat…the kind that makes you invisible and conspicuous,” she says. She never planned to have “Blown Sideways” staged; she simply wanted to write something good enough to snag an agent. “I was hoping to get a couple of productions, maybe start working somewhere,” she says. When the show was in previews, she was still hunting for a good waitressing job.
But Shear will never serve lunch in this town again. “Blown Sideways” will transfer to a larger theater soon. And she’s now got a powerful ICM agent, not to mention a second agent handling a book version of the play. She’s even getting movie auditions–most recently with Paul Newman. “I’m a really square boy from Shaker Heights,” he cautioned her. “I’m round, Mr. Newman, and from Brooklyn,” she replied. Nice work, if you can get it.
PHOTO: Blown onstage: From greasy spoon to Paul Newman (WILLIAM GIBSON–SWOPE ASSOC.)
Subject Terms: BLOWN Sideways Through Life (Drama) ; SHEAR, Claudia
Copyright 1993 Newsweek: not for distribution outside of Newsweek Inc.
