A Monkey in LA
by Bruno Lajeunesse
For me, choosing a play at the beginning of the Fringe is always a total guess. I told myself that maybe a show that was created far away and brought to Montreal must be something worth at least a 10-minute Bixi ride to Saint-Dominique Street. I found this play from Los Angeles playwright/actor, Bradley Spann.
The story tells of an LA South Central boy's relationship with his divorced parents, sisters, a monkey, and a racoon. After ten minutes of this monologue, Spann's voice modulation started to GET on my NERVES! Also, the problem with a grown man playing a child (and a monkey, and a racoon, etc.) when it's not well done is that your attention is drawn to the mimicry and you miss important bits of the storyline. For instance: if there was a link between the boy's comic books and America's bicentennial, I didn't get it.
I understand that the Fringe is not a festival of big multimedia productions but during this piece with a solo actor wearing a black t-shirt on an empty stage surrounded by black curtains, I missed the interaction between actors.
June 13 - 21
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