Review: (Montreal) Verbal Diarrhea (Fringe)

Notes on (Love) Life

Sarah Deshaies

@sarahdeshaies

There is no dearth of plays about dating and love at the Fringe Festival, especially by white heterosexual males. Gerard Harris, a white heterosexual male, is the first to acknowledge that. But he is also a storyteller and a comedian, and he will go down that path.

Verbal Diarrhea, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Bomb at Love is Harris’ attempt to draw lessons from his life so far. We go through a patchwork quilt of stories, picking up threads of meaning here and there. We begin with Harris's fraught birth, and skip through a series of big moments: crushes, dates, sexual encounters gone awry, escapes.

Harris is a seasoned storyteller, with a hypnotic, lisping British accent, and he moves fluidly from tale to tale. I couldn’t stop taking down his quips and turns of phrase (and I apologize, Gerard, if you’re reading this, because I did it on my phone). The only thing Verbal Diarrhea needs is more structure, to break up the steady onslaught of stories - something more artful than sips of water or beer - a more theatrical setup to pin this show on.

Take a date or a friend to this one and compare your own thoughts on life.

Verbal Diarrhea is at the Montreal Fringe