Review: HO HO HO HA HA HA HA at Woolly Mammoth

Julia Masli was a hit when she first came to the Woolly Mammoth Theatre for her 2024 one-woman performance piece “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha,” soliciting problems from the audience and conjuring community, whimsy and sometimes magic on the way to solving them.

Her job description is “Estonian clown,” but she lives in London and wowed audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023, which is where Woollly picked up on it.  

The D.C. theater loved her so much they suggested she return for a Christmas show, now titled “Ho ho ho ha ha ha ha,” pretty much using the same approach, but with a red ribbon on it and a smattering of snow.

Masli emerges from the black in a blue gown, lighting her wide-eyed face with a light strapped to one hand held aloft (it might just be her smartphone’s flashlight app). She affixes a golden mannequin leg onto her left  arm. Taped to it is a microphone that she can extend it into the audience for her brief inquiries.

There are no cheap laughs in a delightful performance that bends more toward art. Indeed, her opening gambit of chanting “ha ha ha ha” is not like a laugh, but more like the breathing exercise that begins Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.” She encourages randomly chosen people in the front row to mimic her “ha” and banishes those who won’t play along. Then comes her forever inquiry: “Problem?”

Such a broad solicitation could bring anything, and it’s her duty to attend to them in her unique way (thus making every performance different).

Her inquiry comes with a quiet approach and a hushed tone. Her widened eyes and a concerned expression  conjures the kind of radical empathy that is the stock in trade of another performance artist, also from Eastern Europe, Marina Abramovi?. 

I can imagine these performances can go any direction depending on the audience input. But the D.C. audience — particularly on a stage where some may have enjoyed her last stop — meant that people were all ready with their sincere responses.

One had a broken heart, another decried high food prices. And though the opening was a full month before Christmas, many had that holiday on their mind. One missed her mother at that time of year, for example.

For this Masli had a set of questions: What did she like to do at Christmas? What were other things she liked? 

Eventually, Masli subtly steered the questioning into whether the departed mother liked music, and if so, what song did she particularly like? After a bit, the woman was invited onto the stage to look up the song in question alongside the guy who had the breakup. (That it turned out to be Joan Baez’ version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”  helped set the melancolic scene).

I’m always interested in what the constants might be in these interactive shows, and for Masli, it’s not just her blissed out Jambi expression and weird costume (her helmet had a spotlight on it, helping her to connect to those in the dress circle). 

In fact, the main constants were hanging from the ceiling: Parts of a broken chair were suspended from the fly stage left, and a bag of something hung from a rope stage right. The broken chair (smashed by Masli to represent something - the past?) suddenly represented the broken-up audience member’s heart. 

Volunteers came up to repair it as the show went on. Another was asked to come up and make a sign to cheer someone up. In this, it was like Miranda July’s participatory performance piece “New Society,” in which its audience was asked to create an intentional community. 

As for the bag, she passed one around and asked patrons to put in one of their socks — an exercise in freeing from the materialism that arises in the season. She promised to burn the bag on Dec. 21 after the run of the show “in front of the Shake Shack on F Street,” adding, “This is real.”

Also real, she said was the gift of a new washing machine, with its own red bow — grandly lowered from the fly and presented as a kind of “Price is Right” prize to someone who professed to “fighting Fascism” all year in an occupied city. (I can’t promise a washer will be given at every performance). 

But I can’t imagine how many things are on ropes above, waiting to descend to solve a specific problem (when food prices were brought up as a problem, a pizza fell from the above, though she didn’t quite have the blocking yet to properly catch it on a platter. She picked it up off the ground and presented it anyway. “Five second rule,” she said.

Christmas is a notoriously hard time for many, so this manifests particularly when an audience is asked about problems.

When a woman brought up her mother’s cancer, Masli seemed at a loss. “They asked me to do a Christmas show,” she muttered more than once.

Still, the woman is skilled enough to be sure to whip up a narrative arc at will out of whatever ingredients her audience happens to provide, and by the end, there’s a kind of crescendo and quiet catharsis.

A pleasing one-woman show is not a one-person operation, however. British comedian Kim Noble is listed as director;  three are credited as costume designers — Alice Wedge, David Curtis-Ring and Annika Thiems — even though there is just one striking costume — a kind of three-legged Statue of Liberty. 

Alessio Festuccia is sound designer and composer (relying on a zippy variation of Mariah Carey’s carol). E-hui is the lighting designer of this production, with original design conception by Lily Woodford. But it’s up to Sarah Chapin to do the crucial “live lighting design” (as Sebastián Hernández does “live sound design”) to react instantly to wherever the performance happens to go. 

As frenzied as the season gets to be it may be absolutely worth trying to squeeze “Ho ho ho ha ha ha ha” in at least once, for the kind of corn-free holiday lift you never saw coming. 

Running time: About 75 minutes, no intermission. 

Photo credit: Julia Masli’s in “Ho ho ho ha ha ha.’ Photo by Jeff Lorch.