No one else on Earth

The night I saw his one-person show, Darrell Hammond had a cold. He’d squelch a cough and sniffle enough to warrant a night off. Bundle up, maybe a toddy or twain, and give the understudy a chance to shine.

When someone else performed one of his monologues, the late Spaulding Gray shouted: “now I can proliferate!”

Problem is: no one else on earth could do The Darrell Hammond Project. Even if the understudy could replicate Hammond’s babble of spot on, Saturday Night Live impressions — Bill Clinton, Sean Connery, Al Sharpton, Ted Koppell, and a “verifiably evil” Dick Cheney, among them — the understudy’d still have to replicate Hammond’s life, which had so many so many soaring highs and splattering lows it unfolds like runaway Climate Change.

He began self-mutilation — “cutting” — at age 19. It made the “red” (flashbacks from a repressed trauma) go away. His military father could be the poster thug for anger management; his musical mother was…distant. She encouraged him to imitate voices. Becoming others became a means of negotiating his unknowable self through the daily hell of living.

The Project’s a psychiatric odyssey, as he moves from one couch to another, 40 in all. He’s wrongly diagnosed for six major medical illnesses, and runs the gambit of psychotropic drugs. He finally meets Dr. K., who sounds like someone out of Kafka, but who peels away the 39 other, zombie-inducing diagnoses.

There’s passing mention of “hitting the pipe” in a crack house, hanging with the Irish-American Westies in Hell’s Kitchen (said to be the most violent gang in American history), incarceration in asylums, stalkers, death threats.

The piece is a confession and a mystery. At times Hammond verges on boasting. He’s never just an average this or that. A running subtext: He must be special. He’s always the worst (waiter, son, etc.). And he has been through hell. His jostled hair and deliberately shaky deliveries enhance his fumbling for an answer. But at times he crosses the line and conveys the sense that even Job couldn’t top these woes.

Robert Brill’s set — black walls, faux marble floor, table — and David Weiner’s often-melodramatic neon lighting call more attention to themselves than necessary.

To his credit, Hammond’s also self-deprecating. And, as expected, he’s funny. The humor often resembles the photographic negative of an SNL skit: beneath the sarcastic surface lurks a harrowing glimpse of the furnace.

Hammond, co-author Elizabeth Stein, and director Christopher Ashley have embedded a stand-up routine in the middle of the 80-minute show. It provides a much-needed respite and lets Hammond strut his truly gifted stuff. It also prepares the way for his best work of the evening: an imagined confrontation with the source of his pain, followed by an unexpected, and amazing, forgiveness.