Lazaros Theodorakopoulos is a young Greek man living in New York. He is touring with a most unusual play, a nearly hour-long rapid fire monologue. It’s called Night Just Before The Forest, written by Bernard-Marie Koltes. He is said to be a successor to Samuel Beckett, Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet. The unnamed character is homeless, unemployed and very alone. He may also be mentally disturbed, His thoughts race through his present and into the future. Stimulating stuff.
Working my way through my favorite shows at the Fringe. The man who performs as Professor Longhair (accurate, but hard to see under the hat) is a professional mental health counsellor. He uses magic tricks as entertainment, of course, but also as a form of therapy. Unlike most magicians, he shows how many of the tricks are done. The purpose is to challenge people’s perceptions, to illustrate that what you think may not be at all accurate. Sounds like a good technique.
By the way, I stayed up to watch President Biden’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. It made me feel so good. We 🩷 Joe.
This may have been the most unusual show I’ve ever seen, and one of the best. Siobhán O’Loughlin was a young woman riding her bicycle on a rainy night. She collided with another cyclist and seriously broke her left hand. She lived alone and had only a shower in her apartment. She couldn’t shower one-handed and feared getting the cast wet. She started asking a series of friends if she could use their bathtubs to bathe.
This was the origin of her show Broken Bone Bathtub. It is literally performed in a bathtub, naked and strategically covered with bubbles. She engages with the small audience, exploring loneliness, vulnerability, fear, embarrassment, and emotional recovery. O’Laughlin asks the audience to help with uncomfortable activities she can’t do herself like washing her back, putting conditioner in her hair and applying lotion to her good limb. The show ends with a kind of emotional catharsis.
O’Laughlin has performed the show all over the world. Check out https://www.siobhanoloughlin.com/ .
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An 800 year old bard must perform ten tasks on his birthday to live another year. He tricks the audience, brings members to the stage for stunts, takes questions, sings sad and happy songs and does amazing beatbox. Fun for all.
Lots more to shoot today, tomorrow and Sunday.
One of my favorite shows so far. Rhonda Brown portrays Molly Ivins, who Americans may know for her acerbic wit, fearless journalism and relentless skewering of politicians, particularly Republicans. She was an unashamed liberal in increasingly right-wing Texas, but worked for many news organizations. One of her funniest bits was about her obituary for Elvis Presley and covering his funeral in Memphis, falling in with a convivial biker convention, that got her fired from the New York Times. It’s worth looking at her biography, particularly the quotations from her work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Ivins
