Orange You Glad I’m Telling You to See ‘Color Theories’?

We’re reaching peak solo show — or sort-of-solo show — in the late-COVID era. Strapped for resources and now actively reviled and threatened by their government, theaters and producers are pouncing on opportunities to lay out a little less money or to spend on one big name in the hopes of clawing their way out of the red. It’s my sense that audiences are on to them, and the taste for stages bereft of bodies is already on the wane. But as with all forms, there are highs and lows of the genre and, before you swear off the solo act, you should see Julio Torres’s irresistible new one with its pop-up furniture and a bossy little robot named Beebo.

Known for Los Espookys, Fantasmas, and Problemista (along with some of SNL’s funnier and kookier bits of the past few years), Torres feels — kind of like Cole Escola and Chris Fleming — like a cause for hope in our mostly terrorizing present. Young (enough), queer, hilarious, and, most important, legit weird, he’s a writer-performer who’s messing around with the stand-up form, treating comedy less like paintball and more like Silly Putty. He also has the kind of sui generis brain you want to take a trippy vacation in, like Alice down the rabbit hole or, if you happened to share a childhood with me, Donald in Mathmagic Land.

In his HBO special, My Favorite Shapes, Torres sits at a futuristic conveyor belt guiding audiences through a parade of mundane objects that are given curiouser and curiouser new dimensions through his blend of gentle absurdism, kidlike make believe, and, as my colleague Kathryn VanArendonk pointed out, genius for defamiliarization. Color Theories is a natural successor, constructing a charmingly surreal container in which Torres can chat to us about his takes on various colors. He pages through a notebook, checking off different hues as he goes (Beebo hurries him along to the next one if he goes off on a tangent, which is always). He also begins with a straight-faced disclaimer: “We’re not gonna get to every color.”

Unfolding on a literal giant storybook of a set, with an aesthetic somewhere between Dalí and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Color Theories is a complete charmer, witty and whimsical in equal measure. Torres has a gift for extended, eccentric metaphor — the kind of juxtapositions that make you snort-laugh because they’re simultaneously so bizarre and so apt. The fact that Barbra Streisand keeps cloning her dog and then taking the clones to visit the grave of “the source” is “very purple behavior.” Purple, you see, “is intrigue. Purple is mystery … Lilac is being a mom. Purple is being a stepmom.” Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson is orange, because orange is “the midpoint between childlike wonder and rage,” and “we love our male celebrities to be orange because that means they’re exciting but not threatening.” (Who else is orange? All those cheeky animated Disney boys from the ’90s: “Simba, Aladdin … Why are they kind of sexy??”) A few letters get the color treatment too: An uppercase E is “a funeral hug” (this during an analysis of Ellen DeGeneres’s visual branding); an uppercase R “has the elegant arrogance of the villain from Titanic. The human, not the iceberg.”

Torres may doodle all over the set and tickle us with throwaway bits like referring to the Flatiron as “the Eataly District,” but there’s also a trenchant through-line in Color Theories that has to do with abuses of authority in a world run by violent bureaucracies. These things are — according to Torres’s theories — navy blue, and the threat of that color’s oppressive manifestations lurks in the show like an under-the-bed monster wearing a toupee and a bad suit. (There is, come to think of it, an amazing anecdote about a toupee.) Just wait till Torres provides abstract illustrations of “rich people doing their taxes” or “a war crime” in oil pastel, or till he diagnoses the U.S. as a country that’s trying to hide its navy-blue tendencies under the “beige mask” of “Pixar acting” and novelty candles. “I don’t mind sentimentality and childlike innocence. What I mind is it being sold to me by navy blue.” Zing. Synesthesia has never been funnier.

Color Theories is at Performance Space New York through October 5.