THE THEATRE: SOLITARY CREATURES

Colin Quinn, Anthony Rapp, and Evan Silver take the mike.

- HELEN SHAW

A backdrop, a stool, a beverage, a microphone. A man wanders on stage and grumbles self-deprecatingly; the audience fidgets in anticipation. The world is in flames, and such familiar comforts are an escape. Please, let us laugh.

We're living through a comedy-astheatre boom: metatheatrical quasiauto biographies (Kate Berlant, Daniel Kitson), avant-garde character work (Natalie Palamides, Cole Escola), quicksilver candor (Jerrod Carmichael, Taylor Tomlinson), and Spalding Gray-esque evening-length storytelling (anything written or produced by Mike Birbiglia). But Colin Quinn, in his soothing, pseudo-cantankerous standup special "Small Talk," at the Lucille Lortel, wants you to know right away that he won't be bothered with all that young person's guff. He's skeptical of social media, if you can believe it. He mocks his own untucked shirt and his gym shoes. ("I'm an old man," he says, "and I'm dressed like a twelve-year-old boy.") His performance is scripted, and loosely organized around themes, but we are mostly in shaggy-comic territory. "Small Talk" is a club set barely disguised as a show.

Quinn's beloved stage persona, tailored and then washed soft by a million tour dates, is a Brooklyn stoop philosopher, an Irish American blue-collar sage. In various comedy specials for Netflix and HBO, Quinn has gruffly shepherded his audiences through a history of the world ("Long Story Short," from 2011), American politics ("Unconstitutional," from 2015), and the formation of New York's demographic hodgepodge ("The New York Story," from 2016). In that last production, buffed to a high shine by its director, Jerry Seinfeld, Quinn talked frankly, and deliberately stereotypically, about race a provocative highwire act in which his tightly packed joke writing and sawtooth bonhomie served him well.