Smart and imaginative, this 'Price' is right
Standing atop an attaché-case-size prop of L. Ron Hubbard's ''Dianetics,'' writer-performer Mike Albo (''Unitard'') begins his brilliant and hilarious solo 90-minute tour de force, ''My Price Point,'' with a breathless description of the audience's ages, incomes, buying styles, and even fears (a ''tumor made of Splenda''). It's a bravura recitative and just a glimpse of the manic, revved-up monologues in the show, which originated in New York last winter and makes its New England debut produced by the Theater Offensive.
Albo presents himself as a gay fashion writer only recently escaped from the Conde Nast building - ''the Death Star for magazines.'' Exhausted by the demands of ''constant trend-making'' and eager for more substance, he flees to Maui. But even there, trendiness, in the form of oceanic Armageddon, awaits: Last winter's tsunami is the news of the day.
Pouting self-righteously, Albo whines, ''The tsunami affected me a little more personally than you because I was in a tropical place.'' Pointing out such shallowness might seem to be conceptually thin, but Albo is so smart and funny that his observations never fail to hit the bull's-eye.
He's also an able actor, embodying a parade of motley types, including Jennifer Lopez's unctuous assistant and his best-known invention, ''the Underminer'' (also the title of a recent book co-written with Virginia Heffernan). The onstage Underminer is a smug know-it-all likely to greet his friend with a hearty ''I hear you're dating somebody! That's great -the end of the dry spell!''
Even when contorting as a yoga devotee, Albo is a high-energy performer. He fits perfectly in Jeremy Chernick's set, which includes a maze of strings connected to dozens of sneakers - a literal evocation of too many choices.
But Albo's characters relish fashion and options, even while being exhausted by them. In one transcendent piece, Albo performs a ''Trend Dance.'' Under flashing lights, he names every craze, communication device, and fashion that's crossed the cultural radar screen in the past 15 years. No further comment is needed when he pulls cellphones of ever-decreasing sizes out of a box and rattles off brand names like an overworked pitchman.
Albo doesn't disappear into his characters, nor does he traffic in memoir. Instead, he presents an imaginative fusion of characters and themes. A former fact-checker and grad student in poetry, Albo has an alertness to the nuances of language and the absurdity of consumer culture that makes ''My Price Point'' the comedy bargain of the spring.
