If you’re fortunate enough to have seen, in the course of your theatregoing years, many different types of performance—plays, cabarets, showcases, immersive theatre, and so on—what stands out, no matter the genre, is the performer’s degree of moral commitment to the work at hand. I don’t mean “moral” in the sense that it’s the actors’ job to tell us whether they agree with the ethics of a given piece (though some do that, too). Rather, what you look for is just how committed players are to connecting with the audience through their craft, the skills that allow them to exhibit and illuminate the awfulness and the lushness of what it means to be a person in the world. Blanche DuBois, that expert on the human heart, has told audiences for generations that the complications of being human preclude “straight” or uncontradictory behavior: there is a great deal of truth in nuance and ambiguity. And yet we are living at a time when nuance and all the confused intentions, desires, and beliefs that go along with it are considered less a way of understanding human frailty than a failure of “accountability.”

The forty-one-year-old Tasmanian monologuist Hannah Gadsby addresses many things in her work: among them, violence against women, men and golf, art history, her lesbianism, and her difference in the world. And that difference is at the heart of her latest show, “Douglas,” which I saw at the Merriam Theatre, in Philadelphia, last month. (The show is now in New York, at the Daryl Roth, through August 24th, before heading to Europe.) As she did in her popular 2018 Netflix special, “Nanette,” which was filmed live at the Sydney Opera House, Gadsby strives to deliver a monologue that’s not a string of self-deprecating jokes—like some of her early work, which she now views as a symptom of her self-loathing and evidence of women’s tendency to marginalize themselves in order not to disturb the status quo. I was touched by this sentiment in “Nanette,” and I wondered, as I watched, how Gadsby would use that kind of directness to strengthen the stories she told, since she is, essentially, a storyteller—someone who uses characters and situations to illustrate her ethos and thus, perhaps, connect more deeply with the audience. But that’s not Gadsby’s goal, not entirely.

Toward the end of “Nanette,” which is seventy-five minutes long, she did ask the audience for something, but it was a different kind of connection. She wanted us to help her move beyond the limitations of standup comedy and to support her wish to speak as herself. So what was this? Standup or performance art? A theatrical monologue or a rant? I was interested in Gadsby’s subversion of a form that I love, but I didn’t entirely understand what she had against it. Of course standup shouldn’t require her to denigrate herself as a woman. Hadn’t she seen the brilliant feminist-minded routines of Lily Tomlin, or learned anything from Tiffany Haddish’s 2017 Showtime special, “She Ready! From the Hood to Hollywood!,” in which, after telling us about an abusive relationship, Haddish shows her incredible generosity by wishing us “all the happiness and joy [we] can fucking handle”? And didn’t Freud and Richard Pryor, among other geniuses, teach us that telling jokes is one way of revealing yourself?

Although Gadsby meant “Nanette” to be a kind of swan song, she was so jazzed by its success that she came out of her brief retirement to give us “Douglas,” which is named for one of her dogs. “You saw ‘Nanette,’ and you thought, I want more?” Gadsby, in a dark suit and a black shirt, said near the start of the show. Then she looked out at the audience. “Well,” she continued, “if fresh trauma’s what you want, I’m fresh out. I don’t know what you expect but can you adjust your expectations?” The crowd laughed, because, having seen Gadsby live or on TV, they pretty much knew what to expect. Gadsby is particularly adept at the promise of a story, like a confectioner licking her lips over the candy that she may or may not hand over to eager children. To wit: “I’m only going to make one Louis C.K. joke,” Gadsby said, tantalizingly, minutes into “Douglas.” She paused. “But it will come so late in the show you’ll forget it’s coming, doubling your pleasure.” Gadsby’s fabled edginess is not so much edginess as excitement at her ability to “edge” the audience, to walk away or turn off the pleasure switch in order to get to what she considers enlightenment.

And yet she doesn’t have a philosophical bent; she is more interested in how the violence of our oppressive social structure has formed her. But before she gets to that she seduces us through more traditional means, telling us how she feels about her body. In “Douglas,” as in “Nanette,” she makes reference to her weight, which she—or her internalized man—finds unattractive. And we wonder, as she tells us that it’s not necessary to diet, just to get a good tailor, how far we’ve come from Phyllis Diller’s and Joan Rivers’s jokes about being unattractive to men, let alone to themselves. Gadsby coaxes us into her story with this sadly surefire old-school misogynistic humor: who doesn’t feel ugly in a world that’s dominated by Big Brother and Big Papa? Isn’t that what those dudes want?

In college, Gadsby studied art history, and in “Douglas” she aims to repudiate what she learned about institutionalized beauty, which, in her view, has no relationship to joy or inspiration. The art history Gadsby studied was, of course, shaped by the male gaze, just as she has been, to some extent—and the world in which she now works is infected by it, too. I can’t say, precisely, how long it took for her to get to her real subject—the all-pervasive white man—but there he was, lurking behind almost everything she said. About halfway through “Douglas,” she announced that she was “willfully needling the patriarchy,” and the audience, which was predominantly white, cheered. “What’s the worst thing you can call someone?” she asked, without waiting for an answer. “You know what I see when I use the C-word? People who wanted me to know that ‘Nanette’ wasn’t funny. I hate to do statistics, but they were all men. They were also men who said I was fat and ugly. ‘You’re a fat, ugly woman, you’re not funny’—it’s a silencing technique.”

But, as you yearn to pick up Gadsby’s broken pieces, you listen for what she doesn’t allow herself to say: that that white-male critical voice is the one that really matters to her. The idea that a black gay writer like me would come from New York to see and appreciate her performance doesn’t figure into her sword-wielding: you can’t make sweeping statements if you allow for subtleties and shifting demographics. In other venues, Gadsby has made a point of asking for more specific language when it comes to race and identity; in a speech at the Hollywood Reporter’s 2018 Women in Entertainment breakfast, after criticizing men who try to distinguish between themselves and “bad” or misogynist men, she said: