Comic tornado In Reno, ADD bests GOP BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
	Rebel Without a Pause Written, directed, and performed by Reno. At Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway through September 26.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, "onomatopœia" is "the formation or use of words, such as buzz or cuckoo, that imitate what they denote." What, then, is the term for a person who can imitate or simulate an entity or expression — its meaning, its connotations, even its appearance — just by uttering the words? I’m not sure such a term exists, but until one does, let’s call it a "Reno." Reno is a comic tornado who’s scheduled to perform her solo show Rebel Without a Pause: Unrestrained Reflections on September 11th at Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway through Sunday — though she promises to do additional shows if there’s a demand, and there should be. When she says things like "mongoose," "static coming out of the top of your head," even "swing state" (this last accompanied by snappy vocal melodies), she becomes their personifications.

Reno has a tousled mane and a mouth that contorts into surprising shapes when she gets indignant — a frequent, if not constant, state. She speaks with such comic zing, it seems that cartoon bubbles are popping out of her mouth. Her gestures are so large and so frequent, you’ll swear you see comet-like trails in the wake of her every wave, wag, flail, and pivot. And she’s funny. Her comedic centrifuge revolves around September 11, which may seem less timely than when she first starting performing these "unrestrained reflections" in 2001, but she offers an authoritative perspective as someone who was sleeping in her loft eight blocks from the World Trade Towers when the planes hit. A work that was in progress on September 10 has since become Rebel, which paints her experience that day and her life since as some sick amalgamation of Survivor and 1984.

Known for several other autobiographically sparked works, including an Off Broadway show about her rehab from a crystal-meth habit and a film documentary about her search for her biological mother, Reno also created and starred in Citizen Reno, a four-episode pilot for Bravo. Each of those works capitalizes on (some might say exploits) her New Yorker–dom. With her hyperkinetic, in-your-face, no-pain-no-shame bluntness couched in paranoid kvetching, she is as quintessentially Manhattan as Woody Allen, Wall Street, Seinfeld, or knishes. She’s smitten with her home town, so she created this show as an homage to it and to the heroes who rose to the top on September 11. The president, for the record, did not "rise to the occasion," she says. "The occasion happened, and he got slapped by it."

Don’t be fooled by the show’s title, either — there are moments that qualify as pauses. (Even someone with self-acknowledged ADD has to breathe.) The silent interludes are few and fleeting, but it’s in those moments that you might connect most intensely with Reno, a reflective, worried woman who’s forever absorbing countless stimuli at once and analyzing and sizing them all up.

Maybe it’s more appropriate to say that her expertise is in cutting matters down to size. Her favorite topics include John "Ashencroftenheimer" and the Patriot Act, Donald Rumsfeld and his strategies in Iraq, the supremacy of her urban Eden, religious fundamentalism, and the paradox of creation science. The show is anchored by the humanity she saw triggered by September 11, but if ever there was an activist in comic guise, it’s Reno. What she advocates seems brutally deep-seated, though, as when she almost pops a vein in exclaiming: "We have the power to recognize this is not how it’s gotta be! We are not a Christian nation!"

Reno’s comic styling is often compared to that of Spalding Gray, not least because she speaks of her ADD (and displays its symptoms, among them chronic rambling and tangents) as openly as the late Gray referred to his depression. But whereas Reno unabashedly lashes out at what she deems wrong in the world, Gray deadpanned. Reno does not deadpan. She is more like a female version of Lenny Bruce: raunchy, smart, and persuasive. Or of Robin Williams, complete with nanoo-esque sound effects and firecracker explosions of righteous anger.

It appears that political comedy is in the midst of a renaissance, and Reno is as much a part of that as Jon Stewart or Al Franken. What distinguishes these performers from basic stand-up mavens of mockery is that they aim to move people to action, not just laughter. (Reno is particularly focused on getting out the vote.) If they are effective, the political bog that we call Washington might get less filthy come January. But that doesn’t mean that life would be entirely good for Reno. She might be out of a gig.