Coxen finds his voice as other people
By Nick A. Zaino III, Globe Correspondent
Boston Globe, October 20, 2006

Audiences at “Chris Coxen's League of Characters, Hot Origins" shows will see a quartet of strange men tonight and tomorrow at the Actor's Workshop.

They'll see Barry Tattle , a pony-tailed smooth talker who loves to croon for the ladies. They'll see Danny Morsel , who uses his unique “combat dancing" in self-defense (mostly against office furniture). Then there's Future Queer , a silver-wigged man from a future where everyone is gay and straight people live in an underground resistance, and Ripps McCoxen, a fitness nut who is never without a two-by-four he has named Linda. They'll even see the newest member of Coxen's repertoire, Stever Pate , the motivational speaker called in to help the other four get in touch with their pasts.

The one guy they won't see much of is Chris Coxen. Coxen shares a love of disco dancing with Morsel and admits he sometimes falls into Barry Tattle mode when talking to women. But the rest is pure fantasy.

“The recipe for all my characters is to pull everybody into something that they can relate to," says the 33-year-old Acton native. “Give them some little bit of familiarity, and then once they have that, once I feel I have them hooked, just shoot them off in a really weird direction."

Coxen has found the perfect showcase for his talents in this weekend's shows, a mix of live and prerecorded sketch, live video mixing by VJ Jeff Mission, live music by the Grownup Noise , and guest appearances by the Walsh Brothers and Dan Sally . Mission will create a video backdrop of each character's thoughts as they talk, created from random footage Coxen has provided him. “Now when you see Ripps up there, you might see a picture of a Camaro peeling out, because that's what he's thinking about, even though he's not talking about it," says Coxen.

More important, the characters will be tied together by the loose theme of working through their individual problems with Stever while discussing where they came from. That's something Coxen hasn't been able to do performing individual characters at clubs and doing an occasional one-person show. “Hot Origins" is just the beginning for Coxen, who would like to keep developing these characters as a group. “I want to create like an ethos, like a ‘Lord of the Rings' where you have all of these interesting characters in a world," he says.

Plus, he finds audiences are more likely to remember a character like Barry Tattle than Chris Coxen, stand-up comic. When he started doing stand-up in 2003, no one remembered his jokes. Now, he says, people come up to him after shows to talk to him about their favorite character quirks, and that's his best chance to make his mark. “I don't want to waste my time being the next Dane Cook or Dave Chappelle," he says. “I want to do something that's definitely different."

< back to press