SHAVED SOAP AND OTHER
MOTIVATIONAL ABSURDITY

He strides onto the stage armed with nothing but a portion of a McDonald's straw taped to his cheek (a maniac's idea of a microphone?) and within minutes has the audience eating out of his hand, howling with laughter at pretty much anything he says. And he says, brilliantly, pretty much anything, all in the guise of being a life coach named Chris John Jackson, inventor of the motivational technique Jackson's Way.

Thirty-one-year-old Will Adamsdale isn't so much a comedian (he won Britain's top comedy award, the Perrier Prize, last summer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival) as a veritable wizard, a virtuoso of the transcendently absurd. Like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he spins a wacky world of increasingly bizarre nonsense out of thin air, creating an exquisitely idiosyncratic worldview that is as funny as it is wonderfully weird.

Mr. Adamsdale is a master of resonant quirkiness, and his 75-minute riff is remarkable for both its sheer inventiveness and its perfect pitch. Not to mention the level of riotous interaction, starting with getting someone in the front row to throw a dish towel - one of his major props - onto the stage. ("Now everybody can see that Toby would have to try real hard not to get the towel on the stage, right, because he's basically standing on the stage. Here we go, Toby, let's do this thing. One, two, three, go! Oh, beautiful. Good work, Toby. Achieved! Want to hear everybody say that - 'Achieved!'")

A fresh-faced, natty presence in a black linen suit, Mr. Adamsdale quickly gets the audience on his wavelength of inspired zaniness and keeps building from there. The core of this endearing spoof of an Anthony Robbins-style motivational speaker is the philosophy of Jackson's Way, a sort of 12-step-to-the-12th-power program of pure pointlessness, with its own strange internal logic.

Mr. Adamsdale works the room, expounding on his technique, a lunatic litany that involves deliberately pointless feats - or Jacksons. (There are also mini-Jacksons and compound Jacksons.) "What I'm getting at, what I'm asking you to do, is to open up your minds to a world of experience that you have never even considered," he urges, with all the unctuousness of a televangelist. "I'm talking about doing something, like going to the bathroom, getting a bar of soap and just shaving off a tiny piece, so nobody would actually see it, pick up that pinch of soap shaving, take it into another room, and leave it there."

Mr. Adamsdale walks the audience through other Jacksons - like taking a piece of trash, a discarded paper cup, say, brought all the way from Australia and switching it with one from America. Or trying to make the word "boy" rhyme with "pickle." Jacksons must be performed with P.T.I. (Push Through with Intensity, as he charismatically puts it, to the point of throwing up).

But only Chris John Jackson himself can really convince you of the transformative nature of Jackson's Way. Which he does, with dazzling P.T.I.

The show runs through June 26 at 59E59 Theater, 59 East 59th Street, Manhattan; (212) 279-4200.