In How To Give Up On Your Dreams Without Really Trying, the audience is expertly life-coached by Bony Lil (Zea Barker) on the title subject. Lil has given up on her dreams and wants to pass along her success at accepting failure. Through interaction, the clown transforms the audience into seminar students who have come to hear her discourse and the wisdom contained therein. One piece of advice given is “if at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail, fail, and give up.” The presentation method includes handwritten cardboard signs that hang with clothespins and string. This ridiculously pathetic visual aid system indicates that she has achieved her goal spectacularly. Other methods used include a Pity Party--wherein audience members toss out statements (“I sat on my glasses”) and receive sympathetic “awwws” in return. There’s guided meditation and dream interpretation too. The show is an excellent mix of physicality and verbal play.
The Last Show You’ll Ever See (Sarah Liane Foster, Nomadic Theatre Company) is a trombone concert energetically played by a high-strung lady with a wonderfully malleable hat. She philosophizes about several hefty subjects between excerpts of Brahms, Wagner, Joplin, Holt, Strauss and others “adapted for trombone.” The narrative revolves around eschatology or the study of the end of the world. Artfully woven into that theme is the risk of pressing buttons, brain surgery, the need for brain cleansing, and historical reenactment. This is an amusingly worried woman with a lot to say. There were a variety of musical and historical endings in this show, but fortunately, for today, the world was not among them.
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