“Day 11, Shows 32-35: TheatreEddys Goes to the 2017 Fringe Festival”
An Evening with an Immigrant
Poet, playwright, and performer Inua Ellams, wearing a t-shirt that boldly says “Never Forget to Say Thank You,” sits at the microphone before the Traverse Theatre audience to relate a story of the many years he and his family take to become legal immigrants within Great Britain. An Evening with an Immigrant, written and performed by him, often sounds more like a spontaneous, created-on-the-spot conversation that is generously peppered by the performer’s own poems that are half-read, half-recited.
Growing up in Nigeria in an upper, middle-class household, Mr. Ellams relates in “Long Line of Troublemakers” his living always somewhere in the middle with a mother Christian and a father Islamic and with himself being since early childhood fluid and flexible in his own gender identification. With hands and arms that rarely stop moving and speak a language all their own, Mr. Ellams uses his own soft, usually measured voice to tell how life became dangerous for the family around the time he was twelve, causing them to escape increasing threats against his father from the far-right Islamists in their community. As with many immigrants, he explains, “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.”
The next fourteen years of he and his family “trying to belong somewhere” become a roller-coaster in both England and Ireland of some ups and a lot of downs as inept, even cheating lawyers and unsympathetic judges over and again make it impossible for the family to receive permanent papers. Poems of the young poet — who increasingly becomes recognized and honored for his poetry — continue to express the emotions of such a journey in ways that the performer’s conversational interludes are not able to do as well.
For the audience, An Evening with an Immigrant is mesmerizing in the beauty of the poems’ lyricism and metaphors while also tension-filled as the actual trials of the journey are revealed. The ninety minutes of the total story begin to feel bit too long; with some editing and tightening of the story as well the performer choosing not to take a mid-performance break of 5-7 minutes, maybe 60-75 minutes would be sufficient. That said, An Evening with an Immigrant becomes a incredibly powerful classroom concerning Great Britain’s system that immigrants must maneuver and of the tremendous costs — emotional, psychological, and financial — that bureaucracy has on them.
When Inua Ellams admits, “Without a doubt, poetry saved my life,” we are thankful that was the case both for the poems produced and for the incredible man sitting there before us to give first-hand witness of what it can mean to be a modern-day immigrant.
Rating: 4 E
******
Pike Street
Nilaja Sun
Barrow Street Theatre Production
A hurricane is fast approaching New York, and a household in the Lower East Side is busy preparing to ride it out even as the family awaits the return of a Navy Seal son and brother who has been awarded a medal for his bravery in Afghanistan. The Puerto Rican family refuses to go to a shelter because of Evelyn’s fifteen-year-old daughter who is severely brain damaged and cannot breath without help of a machine (not eat or speak on her own). To ensure Candice’s dialysis machine will continue to work, Evelyn has brought a generator into their fifth-floor, walk-up flat but has not had time yet to read the instructions for its operation. Besides preparing for her brother’s welcome, she is trying to appease her alcoholic father who only wants to play the numbers before the storm arrives. She also wants to make sure the elderly Jewish woman below them who is having memory issues has what she needs before the storm hits.
The most remarkable part of the story being told in Pike Street is that all these and more residents of the ethnically rich neighborhood are all played by the piece’s author, Nilanja Sun. We first see the mouthpiece of this one-person show sitting with a body grossly distorted — head slanted precariously upward, mouth severely askew, and both hands and legs knotted in ways that make one cringe to see. This is our introduction to Candice, and the performer will remind us from time to time how the 15-year-old is reacting to the people and events around her. For all the other characters, Ms. Sun employs an incredibly impressive range of voices, accents, body positions, and ways of walking to bring each of the people to life on the stage-in-the-round.
As the thunder begins to rumble and the rains and winds pick up in intensity, the story inside the house also intensifies as emotions become raw not from the storm, but from histories leaving scars that get rubbed raw by memories jarred, challenges made, and stories retold. Before the eye of the passing hurricane hits, an unexpected storm explodes within the household; and our final image of a young, invalid girl of fifteen takes on new significance given what this family has been through in deciding to ride out the storm.
Rating: 5 E
******
Testosterone
Kit Redstone
What is it like to enter a men’s locker room for the first time at the age of 33, yourself having only recently experienced in feelings, looks, and strength the effects of a raised testosterone level that most boys twenty years your junior are experiencing? Kit Redstone relates in his new work Testosterone (created in conjunction with Rhum and Clay Theatre Company) what it was like for him completing his transition from woman to man and then testing out his new body and self in a pumped-up, sweat-filled locker room of a gym. Along the way, he asks the question over and again, “What does it mean to be a man?” At the same time, he declares, “I need to know I am not an imposter in this place.”
Through a series of often funny and even outlandish scenes that are also touching and emotionally powerful to watch, Kit Redstone and his fellow three actors (Daniel Jacob, Julian Spooner, and Mathew Wells) explore manhood in its many and varied forms. Musical numbers (mostly performed by Daniel Jacob as “the Diva”) and well-executed and often hilarious choreography (directed by Matthew Wells) accent the Mr. Redstone’s narration and the interactions with and among the pretty boy, muscle men of the gym. Kit’s mistakenly taking one of the other guy’s towels to use as his own as a wrap around his otherwise naked body becomes the spark for an entire series of showdowns and challenges, all leading to a climatic revelation that proves nothing can beat live theatre for maximal, emotional impact.
Director Julian Spooner has made some brilliant choices in making this story fun, exciting, educational, and heart-warming all at the same time. But at its core, the reason Testosterone succeeds as a terrific hour of theatre is because of Kit Redstone ability to be and tell a story that needs to be seen and heard far and wide.
Rating: 5 E
******
Joan
Lucy J. Skilbeck
The fifteen-century story of Joan of Arc — a woman warrior who leads an army of French patriots against the invading English — is told in a more modern-day version while keeping all the historical context and characters in a one-woman show, Joan. Written and directed by Lucy J. Skilbeck, Joan is performed at the 2017 Fringe by Lucy Jane Parkinson, herself a rather butch-looking warrior with ample metal and tattoos on her body and a walk that is more stomp than not.
There is a Scottish ring to this Joan’s voice and the people we meet via Ms. Parkinson’s solo performance, even through the characters are mostly all French. A character we never see but is always present for Joan and the telling of her story is St. Catherine, from whom Joan takes her heavenly charge and whom she seems to consider her best friend and confident. Her Joan keeps looking for Catherine to appear, even making an audience member move to clear an aisle-visible chair for the expected heavenly visitor.
Ms. Parkinson has a certain crude, unpolished roughness of style and approach that works to some extent in her portrayal of Joan but also at times almost appears sophomoric. The story progresses to the expected fiery climax that every schoolchild knows from history texts. In the end, a gender-bending, modern look at the Joan of Arc story proves mildly intriguing and amusing without quite proving the point of its undertaking.
Rating: 2.5 E
Leave a Reply