Toronto – So what’s most important in a one-person show? You could say any number of things regarding the script or the acting or what have you. I think that above all, you have to be a great storyteller to really make a one-man or one-woman show work.
There’s no greater example of this than Rob Gee’s Fruitcake – Ten Commandments from the Psych Ward. There’s some other elements to Fruitcake: ostensibly there’s kind of a plot about a night shift in a psychiatric ward with a “voice of God” giving out ten commandments like “thou shalt laugh at each other” and “thou shalt not kill…thyself…on my shift” that sort of introduce each segment. Really, though, it’s just Rob Gee telling stories, and the “commandments” part is secondary. Possibly it’s just in there because “Fruitcake – Rob Gee Tells Stories About Back When he Used to Work as a Psychiatric Nurse” is a pretty terrible title.
Anyway, it works because Rob is a great storyteller. He’s funny and amiable and just looks like he’s having a terrific time throughout, and he also has that sort of John Cleese-like ability to flail his long limbs around in way that makes everybody smile. The stories he tells are engrossing. There’s the speed freak and the rehabbing alcoholic who, as Rob puts it, had a real commitment to their habits. There’s the prank he and a patient pulled on a nurse on his first night who was terrified of giving needles. There’s the paranoid schitzophrenic who thinks he’s the subject of a massive experiment. And there’s the horrifying story of the man who boiled his hand, then cut it off with a circular saw because a voice in his head told him it would save a friend half a world away.
Rob manages to tell these stories with a level of humanity and empathy that’s hard to balance in tales of mental illness. He doesn’t feel sorry for these people, nor does he make the audience feel sorry for them. They’re real people, not so very different than you or me, just with a few more chemical imbalances in the brain. As Rob tells stories of helping them with their tenuous grip on sanity, and in some cases just trying to keep them from killing themselves that very night, there’s a lot of laughs, and some uncomfortable squirms. They’re great stories, told by a master, and it makes a show worth seeing.
Unfortunately, as good as Fruitcake was, it started late, and as a result I missed the start of my next scheduled show. Let this be a lesson: if you have less than five minutes to get from a play at St. Vladimir’s to one at the Helen Gardiner Phelan playhouse, you’re probably not going to make it, unless you really pound the pavement.
After killing time for about 90 minutes, only about seven people joined me to see The Dentist. It’s a show about the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and her quest to learn exactly what it was he did when he was held at the camp at Auschwitz. This causes her to reflect on a dysfunctional relationship with a father prone to irrational rage and abuse.
I don’t know what it was exactly, but this show just didn’t click. I’ll grant that it might have been the lack of audience; it’s hard to get excited for a performance when there’s eight people in a room made for 112. Maybe it’s the translation; originally written in Hebrew, playwright and performer Razia Israely had the show translated and took English lessons to try and get it to work. In any case, on this night it wasn’t working: Ms. Israely’s performance was flat, she didn’t seem entirely comfortable giving the show in English, the music cues were occasionally off, and while the plot seemed like something you might enjoy if it were a short story, it didn’t make the transition from an ok story to a good stage show. This play has gotten good press at other festivals, like Edinburgh, so it’s possible that Wednesday was just a bad night and it’ll be better during the rest of the Fringe. A great storyteller could maybe get this one to work, and maybe Ms. Israely is that in Hebrew, or on other nights. But things were pretty rough on opening night, and I can’t recommend the show based on what I saw.