Cornell alumnus Mark Vigeant ’11 brought his latest one-man comedy piece, The Best Man Show, to The Schwartz Center Black Box Theatre last week ahead of his off-Broadway debut this Friday and Saturday.
Directed by Joanna Simmons, the show features Paul, who is tasked with giving the best man speech at his brother’s polyamorous commitment ceremony, a speech that slowly devolves into a mess of random dancing, cat-themed musical performances and drunken rants on the nature of love. The show held at The Schwartz Center was jointly produced by Cornell Students Create and The Whistling Shrimp.
The Sun spoke with Vigeant about the process of building the show and what it means to him as a performer and as a person.
“I wanted to explore love,” Vigeant said. “Love is the most powerful force that humans reckon with. … Love is the thing that makes us do the impossible, it’s the thing that helps motivate us and energize us, … because we love someone or something or ourselves.”
Starting with this emotion, Vigeant constructed what he considers to be his greatest work yet. He said that the idea to format the show as a best man speech came to him while attending two different weddings, both for people who were members of The Whistling Shrimp, Cornell’s oldest improv comedy group, as Mark was during his undergraduate years.
“[The show is] all fiction, but the emotional truth is real,” Vigeant shared with The Sun. “It’s all based on real stuff. But nothing in the show actually happened.”
Vigeant also described the development of Paul, from a “wretched, ugly character” based on similar people in Vigeant’s own life to someone that he developed empathy for.
“I think what Paul is missing is [that] he doesn’t love himself. He loves his brother, he loves his family, he loves his wife, he loves his daughter,” Vigeant said. “But he’s very lonely.”
At the start of the show, every audience member was asked to fill out a piece of paper sharing their thoughts on what love is. According to Vigeant, Paul “doesn’t have a good answer.”
Vigeant as Paul explores the effect of toxic masculinity and loneliness on how a person experiences and seeks love. The show is also interactive, with audience members recruited spontaneously to play different characters in Paul’s life, creating a show that is different every single time that it runs.
Vigeant has performed The Best Man Show at festivals on three different continents and won Best Comedy and Best of Broadwater at the 2024 Hollywood Fringe Festival. He will be making his off-Broadway debut at the SoHo Playhouse this Friday and Saturday.
Update, 12/5, 12:55 p.m.: This article has been updated to include information about the organizations that organized the show at The Schwartz Center.