Review: (Toronto) Polly Polly (Fringe)

I Think I'm in Love
by Ramya Jegatheesan
@RamyaJImages

Who is Polly? She’s nobody. Or at least that’s what Polly thinks.  So she hides and lives in movies and bathes in lines like “You had me at hello” and “We’ll always have Paris”. 

But can an average call centre girl be the heroine of her own story? Will anyone want to watch her? Who would you be if you could be anybody? Who are you? These are the questions Jessica Moss grapples with in Polly Polly. Throw in a trolling omniscient narrator, some septuagenarian undergarments and Beyonce’s baby and you’ve got the makings of a riotous hit. 

Sunday Feature: Jessica Moss of Polly Polly (Fringe: Toronto)

Everything is Something.

by Jessica Moss

It’s that feeling. Panic coupled with exhilaration. Like a small, hefty weight directly on the sternum, it doesn’t stop your forward momentum but it does make you feel each breath expanding against your chest and the increasingly rapid ‘thump thump’ of your heart. It feels like living, but it also feels suspiciously like dying. 

Ah, the Fringe.

I’m deeply in love with the Toronto Fringe Festival, and the Fringe movement as a whole. It makes me feel something I can’t get anywhere else, and makes me proud and happy to have spent so much of my life hiding in theatres, trying to be a part of this world. It’s so much fun, so frantic, it all seems perfectly natural and recklessly fun to have a beer at noon and see a play at midnight. In an alley. Starring puppets made of garbage. There’s a madness to Fringe, and I think that madness allows for some really great theatre to happen.