Meaningful, long-lasting connections can take a while to form, but when Nina Conti met her future partner-in-crime, she knew they were simpatico right away.
“It was one of those moments where I felt very grounded as soon as I saw his face,” Conti, a British performer and writer, said in a video conversation. “It was the chemistry between my personality and something so cozy about him. You can put him in a handbag, no problem.”
It might be worth mentioning that the face in question belongs to Monkey, the puppet that has been Conti’s main scene partner for most of her nearly 25 years as a ventriloquist.
“You can actually project anything onto that face,” she said. “Wisdom is what I choose to project onto it. When I look at him, I expect him to say something wise that might get me out of a tight pinch. But it’s weird because onstage it’s kind of the opposite: He’s throwing me in the [expletive] all the time, and I’m clambering to apologize and keep up.”
Creating and sustaining personal relationships seems to matter to Conti, who inherited the dummy collection of her lover and mentor, the theater maker Ken Campbell, after he died in 2008. (She explored that grief-stricken time in the 2012 documentary “Her Master’s Voice,” which also follows her to a ventriloquist convention in Kentucky.) Now, close encounters of the potentially romantic kind are at the center of “The Dating Show,” which Conti is performing at SoHo Playhouse through March 2.
Monkey, however, is not her main collaborator in that piece — the audience is.
The impetus for “The Dating Show” came from interactive segments where Conti would strap masks onto willing theatergoers. Those contraptions tie behind the ears and cover the lower half of the face; Conti manipulates the articulated jaw with a stick as she supplies voices, essentially turning the volunteers into live puppets.
“They would start to interact in a way where I thought, ‘Good Lord, this is a flirtatious medium — I didn’t set out for this, but people are uninhibited and they’re starting to flirt, so why don’t I just embrace that and do a dating show?’” Conti said.
Originally, she considered developing the concept for television, but the live shows turned out quite differently from what she had envisioned. “As soon as I started to force any kind of matchmaking, I started to feel sick,” she said, explaining that she found connecting people a terrifying responsibility. “I can’t cope — I’m a ventriloquist! So I started to lean into the comedy. If the dates go well, then great.”
Conti, who gives her age as 145 in Monkey years (“but he’s immortal so who’s counting”), is the daughter of the actors Kara Wilson and Tom Conti, who was last seen portraying Albert Einstein in “Oppenheimer.” She has extensive training and experience as an actress (including a stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company near the start of her career), and American audiences may remember her from the Christopher Guest series “Family Tree.” (Her co-star Michael McKean is presenting “The Dating Show” in New York.)
In addition to those skills and her wizardry as a ventriloquist, Conti really highlights her brilliance as an improviser in “The Dating Show”: Each performance is largely ad libbed on the spot as Conti interacts with the people she brings onstage and fits with masks. She picks up on their body language and spins whole conversations out of thin air. Those can quickly go off the rails, and that’s even before Monkey engages in speed-dating rounds. (The shows are so different from one another that Conti has posted an entire one, shot in Edinburgh, on YouTube.)
I happened to be at a performance of “The Dating Show” at SoHo Playhouse last year when the actor Richard Kind ended up onstage. He had never heard of Conti, but had tagged along with some friends. “I was flabbergasted,” he said in a recent phone interview. “I just thought she was phenomenal. So then I went the next night because I realized you sort of want to see it closer.”
Kind — who noted that “the most maligned entertainers are mimes and ventriloquists” — was particularly impressed by the emotional shades she works into the show. “There are times when it’s filthy, when it’s loving, when it’s sweet,” he said. “She takes you through all sorts of permutations of a relationship.”
And she does it at dizzying speed, relying on a combination of technique, instinct and unerring comic timing.
“With that energy, whatever they give off, I am not even able to stop and much think what the next thing is to say,” Conti said. “I’m so busy spinning the plates, doing the ventriloquism, doing the voices and all of that, I think that maybe through lack of thought the truth emerges more quickly, because there’s no design, there’s no time for it.”
“I’m wary of being pretentious here,” she continued, “but I think the truth speaks often through masks because it turns out the mask is actually a more honest thing than somebody’s own face, which is busy telling lies all the time. You take out the lower half of the face and you’re left with just the eyes. And you go, ‘Oh my God, there you are.’”
If you’re familiar with any ventriloquist at all, chances are it is the wildly popular, decidedly not P.C. Las Vegas regular Jeff Dunham. Compared to him, Conti will make your head spin. She is fascinated by the meta aspects of her art form — one of her best routines imagines Monkey taking possession of her body — and with the way it allows her to explore psychological morass. The virtuosic, hilarious ending of “The Dating Show” lifts the veil on some of Conti’s anxieties.
She took her interest in the way we relate to ourselves and with one another even further in her feature debut as a director, “Sunlight,” whose filming recently wrapped. In it she plays a woman who wears a life-size monkey suit and goes on a road trip with a fellow misfit played by the comedian Shenoah Allen (who wrote the screenplay with Conti, and who co-hosts the podcast “Richard and Greta” with her).
Conti enlisted the creature-effects specialist Vanessa Bastyan, who has worked on “Star Wars” projects, to build a full-size monkey suit. She did stand-up in it, then decided to use it in a movie.
“It’s where a woman prefers to live in a monkey suit than be herself,” Conti said of the film’s premise. “It’s like a kind of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in reverse: The last thing she wants is to ever come out, because she can’t live up to it. That’s so deeply me, this, because I’ve spent my whole life entertaining with this thing, and taking the back seat.”
In a way the film is the apex to one of Conti’s most meaningful, and perhaps most overwhelming, relationships. “You think, ‘This is so much stronger than me — how can I ever put it away? I’ll have to go in, I’ll have to lose me and evolve into him completely,’” she said. “It’s the ultimate end of this conversation with Monkey.”
