Nate – A One Man Show

Palamides, as Nate, enters in a red mackinaw jacket with no shirt, combat boots and camouflage pants, with a fake mustache, fake wig and fake body hair. Nate performs a mock motorcycle stunt with an audience member. Nate hands out cans of La Croix Sparkling Water to several people and says that the first person to finish their can "gets to do whatever they want to whoever they want in this room". Finishing his can rapidly, Nate approaches an audience member, hands cupped, and asks if he can touch her breasts. She declines. A different woman gives permission, and a man allows Nate to grab his crotch.

Nate picks a couple from the crowd and asks the woman questions about herself, saying that each answer matches the description of his ex-girlfriend, whose "tuna casserole pussy" he misses. He eventually concludes that the woman—Helen (which Nate pronounces "he-lane")—is his ex-partner, and challenges her partner to a fight. Both topless, Nate wrestles with the man. He performs a half nelson on Nate but declines to flick Nate's nipples.

Nate takes a shower, stripping mostly naked, with a rubber penis in the genital area. Calling out for his best friend, Lucas, an audience member responds. Nate pushes Lucas to call Helen a "whore ass" and asks Lucas to dry him off. They do an elaborate handshake. At an art painting class, the teacher Miss Jackson (a mannequin voiced by Palamides) asks Nate to give his presentation. Nate shows an artwork of a naked woman's body—his ex-girlfriend Helen.

Nate and Miss Jackson go on a date, attending the show Nate and becoming heavily drunk. Nate passes out for a second and suggests they go home, but Miss Jackson proceeds to take his penis out and give him a handjob. At her insistence, Nate autofellates (sucks his own penis). She suggests that they have sex and Nate initiates the act. However, Miss Jackson loses consciousness and Nate stops. With Lucas' help, Nate takes her home.

In the shower again, Nate asks: "is what I did wrong?" Audience members shout out "yes" and "no" in disagreement. Miss Jackson says that she should not have got so drunk, and does not remember the exact sequence of events. At the next art class, Nate and Miss Jackson each apologise for raping the other person, disagreeing with each other's apology.

Natalie Palamides

Palamides has a history of clown performance training and improvisation, though she did not view Nate as pure clowning as it contains sexuality and anger. In a Los Angeles clown training program at the Lyric Hyperion, Palamides was asked to develop a bit in which she felt at risk.[1] She repurposed a previous character, Nate, from 2012 when creating drag characters with the Pig Iron Theatre Company. He was a silent character that Palamides described as a "douchey guy chugging a two-liter bottle of soda watching TV and burping".[1][2]

She experimented with Nate wrestling an audience member topless. Because of her gender, she felt it had a "taboo quality" different to men wrestling topless. Inspired to construct a love story for Nate, Palamides being exploring consent as a theme.[1] Palamides wanted to engage the audience in ideas through comedy and asking what they thought rather than saying her own opinion. During workshopping, she experimented with material based on sexual misconduct by Harvey Weinstein or Louis C.K., such as mimicking masturbation in a hotel setting while an audience member read a script, or pouring Tic Tacs in drinks passed to the audience.[2]

Palamides enjoyed making audiences feel uncomfortable. She explored how to turn any audience reaction to Nate's behavior—a "yes", a "no", or silence—into humiliation.[1] Palamides aims to get participants willing to be active, such as by calling "hey Lucas" to the crowd and letting a volunteer respond, but found that sometimes participants need to be changed and some were willing to do more than others. She used stage combat if someone was unwilling to wrestle her, to give the appearance of fighting when the person is just holding her arm. The person who played Lucas in the recording was "very reserved": other participants add ingredients to the sandwich referenced in the handshake. He felt that Palamides was looking at him and choosing him, even though she was unable to see the audience in the lighting.[2]

Palamides initially performed the show to audiences of under 100 people. Nate played at the Los Angeles Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and at two New York tours. At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2018, it won the Total Theatre Award.[1] Palamides also performed at the Dublin Fringe Festival in Ireland and in London. She estimated that she delivered it 100 times as a completed show.[2]

After a Paper Kite producer saw the show at Edinburgh, Palamides met with Amy Poehler, founder of the production company, about adapting it into a recording. To make it marketable despite the visible genitals, Palamides suggested changing the color of the rubber penis or using fake nipples, but this idea was dismissed.[2] When performing onstage, Nate would enter to a poor karaoke rendition of "Bad to the Bone", but the production were prevented from using the original or an imitation, though they had no issue using the brand names La Croix, Uber and Lyft.[2] Funding was received from Comedy Dynamics.[2] The special was directed by Phil Burgers ("Dr. Brown"), who runs the Lyric, and released on Netflix on December 1, 2020.[3][1][4]

Brian Logan of The Guardian gave the Netflix special five out of five stars, saying that Palamides succeeds in "winning sympathy for our macho host without apologising for him". Logan found it "outrageously funny" in parts, such as the wrestling action, while "orchestrating seemingly crude audience encounters with real care". He praised the directing for "capturing the unease, and the thrill, of being in the room with Palamides": multiple cameras capture footage of the audience and Nate from several angles. The special can be seen as more provocative on screen on Netflix than live at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, as the explicitness and "unstable audience interaction" are less "par for the course".[3] Audra Schroeder gave it four stars in The Daily Dot.[4]

Martin rated it nine out of ten, summarizing it as "a daring farce about consent and machismo that's often hilarious and always provocative". He praised Palamides as "far more outrageous and boundary-pushing than those jurassic stand-up bozos who act like racism, sexism and homophobia are somehow still shocking", despite the recording lacking the full effect.[8]

Das praised the recording as "the year's most admirable, startling comedy special", saying that it "succeeds in revealing as much about a viewer as it does about Nate". Das saw it as "essential groundwork in compassion". She highlighted skill in Palamides' setting up the character Lucas, played by an audience member, and the unexpected development of the "bad date" storyline with Miss Jackson. Das found it to succeed in telling audiences "the hard truths about the world around without making it seem like a preachy lesson".[6]

Veronica Lee of The Arts Desk lauded it as a "very funny and deeply thoughtful" work that contains "a clever deconstruction of toxic masculinity". Lee viewed the Netflix performance as having less sense of jeopardy, as the viewer is not a potential participant, but said that the audience reactions of horror, confusion and laughter give the work "even more power on a second viewing".[7]

• Logan, Brian (July 22, 2018). "Can you do comedy about rape? Natalie Palamides thinks so". The Guardian.

• Nate – A One Man Show on Netflix
• Nate – A One Man Show at IMDb