In ​“The Lion,” Playwright Shows His Pride

Benjamin Scheuer had reached perhaps the most dramatic moment in his one-man show The Lion. Dressed in a neat suit and holding a guitar, he was describing a harrowing visit to the doctor when someone in the audience sneezed.

“Bless you,” he said, without dropping a beat. And then to the rest of the audience: ​“I mean, we’re all here, you know?”

Which is part of the whole point of The Lion, a one-man show written and performed by Scheuer with the aid of six guitars and a small barrage of well-placed microphones.

The show, running at the Long Wharf Theatre from now until Feb. 7, is in a sense the full flower of the singer-songwriter genre from which Scheuer emerged to create this theater piece about his own life, from a complicated childhood through love found and lost to a brush with death. Filled with bold melodies, clever lyrics, and nimble guitar playing as it is, The Lion is, above all, honest and earnest.

Scheuer has been performing the show since at least the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which launched an Off-Broadway run, and he does it now with practiced ease. He is a charming performer, confident yet just self-deprecating enough, and seamlessly moves between story and song. His fleet performance lets The Lion’s high points soar, and ensures that some of its shakier moments pass quickly.

Apart from the performance, The Lion can be a little uneven. It’s at its best when it’s at its sweetest. Scheuer also knows how to deliver bad news in a quiet, poignant way. The more angsty moments of the play, particularly the single electric guitar number dealing with Scheuer’s days as a rocker in New York City, are less convincing. The moments of shredding don’t quite shred. And the glimpse we get of Julia, the first lost love of Scheuer’s life, is tantalizing enough to want more. It’s unfair, in some ways, to ask that The Lion give us her point of view of their relationship — this is a one-man show, after all — but even when Scheuer performs a song written in her voice, it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re getting less her voice than his version of her voice.

But The Lion isn’t a romance. It’s really a story about family — Scheuer’s complicated relationship with his father, the fallout from that tension, and how the whole family deals with it. This beating heart of the play delivers from the earliest scenes in which his father, also a guitar player, sings his kids a song. ​“What makes a lion a lion?” the father asks. The question at first seems to be answered almost immediately in another early standout song in which Scheuer sings that ​“it’s the way that we weather the storm.” But in the end, an older, wiser Scheuer learns that the answer, if there is one, doesn’t lie within himself. ​“It’s not the roar that makes the lion,” he sings. ​“It’s the pride.”

The Lion joins Dael Orlandersmith’s Forever, which Long Wharf also gave a run on its more intimate Stage II, as another one-person show about coming to terms with your past. Long Wharf Theatre is to be commended for taking the risk on both of these plays, new works written and performed by younger playwrights. Judging from the standing ovation Scheuer received at the end, it was worth it.

The Lion runs at the Long Wharf Theatre’s Stage II through Feb. 7. Click here for more information.

Click above to watch Scheuer perform ​“Weather the Storm,” a song from the show, on WNHH radio’s ​“Betsy Kim Law, Life & Culture” program.