Isaac Oliver: Reading as Cabaret
On a Friday night in June at Joe's Pub, at the Public Theatre, as the writer and performer Isaac Oliver's show began, an announcement came over the P.A. system: "Isaac Oliver will be performing without an appendix." Three weeks before, while on a writers' retreat in Martha's Vineyard, Oliver had had an emergency appendectomy. On a screen above the stage, we saw a video, set to music, of Oliver, a pale, bespectacled, …