Alex Edelman is such a disarming company that a show he is visibly still building in front of you beats most people’s finished hours. What Are You Going to Do is not yet the precision instrument that Just for Us was, but it is warm, funny and serious about the right things.
This is solo storytelling comedy, the form Edelman has made his own – autobiography sanded down into stand-up, delivered by a man who sounds like he is improvising and lands like he has drilled every beat for a decade. The premise lives inside the title. Faced with a world that keeps demanding to know what you are going to do about any of it, Edelman spends the evening turning that question back on himself, and the honest answer he keeps arriving at is: tell you about some seashells.
He is not joking about the seashells. An early stretch about his collection is the sort of low-stakes material that only a real technician can make sing, and it earns its place by quietly setting up everything heavier that follows. From there he ranges wide: a spell as a clown in a children’s hospital in Jerusalem; a genuinely strange pilgrimage to Elvis’s Graceland; a childhood in which he was tested for autism; a father who is a near-Nobel cardiologist, and the low hum of suspicion that saving lives might have been the more useful vocation. Antisemitism gets handled sideways rather than head-on, which is smarter and sharper than the frontal approach. The through-line, when it surfaces, is about belonging and usefulness, about whether a person should be doing something more obviously good with the time.
Where the writing wobbles is the join. He believes, as he has said elsewhere, that there is always a way to navigate complicated stuff, and the individual navigations here are frequently superb – the Graceland material, the autism-testing routine on which he stays a beat ahead of the audience throughout. What is missing is the corridor between the rooms. Just for Us ran on a single narrative engine, that infamous gathering of white nationalists, which dragged every digression forward on a rail. This is a house of beautifully appointed rooms with no hallway yet connecting them. The title poses its question with real force and then rather declines to answer it, which may be the point or may simply be a show that has not finished thinking.