Mary Anne Butler's text sounds like the enunciated version of a tonal poem. There are no emotional explosions, the tone throughout is cool and casual. Flat. Prattling on in poetic prose that is heavy with exposition from elliptical beginning to end, engendering recitation rather than a performance.
The stories he tells us, at their heart, aren't really funny stories. And yet he has us laughing along with him. He tells us of his broken relationships, job loss, the “cancery” death of his mother, his homelessness... the miserable list goes on.
Welcome to The Flick, a Worcester, Massachusetts movie theatre, home to one of the last motion picture projectors in the state. The Flick is a dinosaur in the digital age, owned by an unseen proprietor and operated by a sassy projectionist and two general hands who clean and run the box office and the candy concession.
The summer weather in Geneva was rotten in 1816 and five house-bound friends, three of whom were Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his 19 year-old wife Mary, told ghost stories to each other until it stopped raining.
This is black humour indeed, but delivered with an unusually light and zany, almost manic style that is hilarious in moments of high comedy and sharp satire.
80 minutes long, one man on stage and a rapt audience. His name is Thomas, Tommo, and he’s about to die. That