Essay: is there still value in a one person show?
Reflections on Fruitcake, Dad Genes and making art for the sake of it
Essay by Martha Latham (and her inner critic)
To sell what we make, we need to find our niche. Our niche is the reason why people see our show, engage with our work and spend their hard-earned essential-worker-dollars on us. Nowhere is this more obvious than during a fringe festival. During fringe, every previously unnoticed, undiscussed corner of human and inhuman society is found, defined and capitalized on 300 times over.
Is this even any good?
For most, this niche-mining exercise is a distasteful, capitalist necessity. Rewriting our behaviours, our histories and our emotions to better fit our niche. Leaning on common tropes and stereotypes to communicate complex ideas with only a black stage, a warm wash and a mic, we spend a bit of nuance to buy a bit of understanding.
It's been almost a month and I've written nothing. This is taking so long and what I've written sucks.
It's not a shameful act. It's always in service to a greater purpose, and we all need to eat. Those who try to resist this demarcation are noble but ignored (and poor).
In more recent years, we have seen an uptick in the kind of identity labeling, boxing and shipping that has become rampant since the advent of a twitter bio. Minority community artists are encouraged to capitalise on their minority status in order to draw on, and by extension cater to, an audience of holier-than-thou liberal socialites and peeping toms rather than their own community members.
Am I coming across as a right-wing pundit in this bit?
Independent artists are always trying to balance the scales of:
diminishing, sanitizing and smoothing their stories to get a greater bang for their buck and,
expressing the core part of them, the bit that sits between the labels and words and marketing, that might cause an audience member to spend the next week's worth of showers thinking about the show.
It is always a delight of mine to witness artists navigate this dilemma.
I hate this sentence but I can't think of anything better because I'm stupid.
I was asked to review two shows this year at fringe. Reviewing takes a lot of time and vulnerability, things I am in short supply of at the moment. When people reach out directly, rather than through a publicist or a social media story, that takes them a good amount of time and vulnerability. I'm always happy to trade like for like.
Both shows had a big collection of labels, expectations and niches to navigate:
queer/theatre/trans/comedy/one-person-show/grief/love-story/neurodivergent/new-writing/young/fringe-festival/stand-up/melbourne/40-minutes/short-season/”emerging artists”/
Neither show denied these labels or hid from them, but neither felt predictable, cliche or boxed.
The artists took each word calmly in their hands, and gently kneading it out, tugging and wrapping and pulling at each label until the audience could see more than a sticky ball of flour and water. We saw the memory of the first time they tried making bread, sticky dough ending up all over their countertop and hands, laughing as they incapable try to rinse it off. We saw the kindness of the first person to show them how to knead properly, the first person to help them get the ratios right, the first person to taste the baked bread and raise their eyebrows in delight.
Quit it with the stupid metaphors.
Fruitcake is an exploration of neurodivergence, queerness and love. Not these words individually, but what they look like hammered together on an anvil with soft and sharp pieces that jut out the sides. It's not a love story in a happy, cuddly way, and it isn't sad either. Fruitcake’s approach to storytelling is akin to the characters that make up its major cast. Lean in, and they'll lean back.
Fruitcake asks: what gets in the way of love? We witness our lead navigate personal and larger societal complications like an obstacle course, always managing to squeeze through, hurdle over or dive under whatever the world (or their beloved) throws at them. It's an exploration of care, boundaries and fighting for what you want. Sometimes, all the hurdling in the world isn't enough. Sometimes, the wall is just too big. The world is just too big
Stop waxing on and try actually describing the show, you idiot.
Fruitcake is a one-person-show that quadruples the size of its cast by using pre-recorded voices. As a result, the lead never feels like they are speaking on behalf of anyone else. Every character gets their own voice, inflection and actor. I much appreciated the use of permanent captioning as well, which made understanding the recorded dialogue a simpler experience, even through the crackle of old speakers.
Works like these remind you of the beauty of fringe. The show had its pitfalls, of course. The venue had a loud rock band playing in the next room, barely muffled by the duct taped foam on the theatre door and the uninsulated plasterboard walls. The writing occasionally got stuck in its own poetry, leaving the simple-minded of the audience (me) glassy-eyed while trying to keep up. The twist ending was jarring with the unanswered question of whether they had been addressing the constable since the start of the play, or whether it was merely a device added at the end.
Compliment sandwich, compliment sandwich.
These are speed bumps on an overall smooth drive, and do nothing to impact your overall engagement with the work. I still had many showers thinking about the play and its characters, about how I love, about how I want to be loved and about the kind of a person who is settled by a Shonda Rhimes quote in a moment of mental panic. Those speed bumps would have been smoothed out with an extra week of rehearsal, a second season, a more polished venue, more money.
These works sit out in the nebulous minds of our country's artists, unfunded and underutilized. Fringe drags them out, still unfunded and underutilized but dragged out nonetheless.
If you love poetry, good communication and Shonda Rhimes, Fruitcake is for you.
Fuck, it's been months and I haven't even started on Dad Genes.
All things on this Earth have a rhythm. You talk to someone at a party and find them extremely difficult to talk to, when suddenly you find an interest you both share and the conversation starts to chug along like a v-line.
This is because you've both found a shared rhythm. Conversations about sport have a rhythm that is different to conversations about Marvel movies.
This is what happens on stage too. We think of performances as a one way conversation, but any performer will tell you that isn't true. The audience might not speak, but you can tell when they aren't listening.
So how do you get an audience to listen?
Make them a slave to your beat.
Ever get entranced by a TikTok on a subject that you don't care about that never seems to go anywhere? You got entranced by the rhythm, baby. Ever get stuck talking to a salesperson in the mall? They got you lost in their sauce. Ever listen to someone incredibly boring talk incorrectly for hours on end about a topic you know a lot about but never interrupt or correct them because you just can't quite seem to find the right moment? You just met a master of the rhythm.
Dad Genes is the newest work by artist Eddie Patterson. Eddie’s last work that I saw was an engaging and well-structured one-person show. It had all the hallmarks of a talented young performer working within a style. It had a PowerPoint. It had a rhythm. It had the “classic one-person show” rhythm. The one that goes like:
Setup, setup, setup. Joke. Pause. Slide or graph that visualises the joke. Pause. Stare at the audience. “I’m not crazy!”
Or:
Words about a needlessly complex and silly topic. Silly quote from key figure within topic. Extra detail about topic. Slight tangent which secretly leads to: Pause. Image joke.
Nobody knows what you're talking about here, cut it.
This isn't a criticism. It’s a good rhythm. Lots of performers use it because it works.
Dad Genes also had a rhythm.
It wasn't the “classic one-person show” rhythm.
It wasn’t the “ex-music-theatre-kid trying to find new outlets” rhythm.
It wasn't the “collection of stories loosely connected and bundled into a single narrative for no reason other than Christ, it's fringe and I have to put a show together for fringe or everyone will forget I exist!” rhythm.
It was Eddie's rhythm.
Some beautiful mix of stand-up, performance and info-dumping amalgamated into an incredible quilt work. Little pieces of style and skill spattered throughout, but mostly something wholly unique and undeniably Eddie.
Oops, I've lost what I was trying to say here.
It represents a pretty incredible step in Eddie’s career. There are some fringe shows that are completely unique one-off masterpieces. Shows that have been built off the rare assemblage of “something totally fucked and weird happening to someone with the skills and training to tell it on a stage”. These shows can rarely go wrong, but often they don't really go anywhere else. The event that happened was more important than the artist. Often, the follow up to this masterpiece is a relatively lacklustre second attempt. This is because, while they still have all the skill and style, they don't really have anything to talk about.
What makes Dad Genes so perfect is how much it wasn't about –
Wow, I really just stopped writing mid-sentence. Mid-November I just stopped writing, got off the train and didn't pick this essay back up until December 7th.
Dad Genes isn't about Eddie's dad dying, nor is it about going on testosterone any more than it is about Eddie’s partner or private school girls rowing. It's about Eddie. Eddie as a comic. Eddie as a person. Eddie as a rhythm. Eddie could go on to talk about dried mushrooms and an audience member would be engaged because of Eddie's rhythm.
I tried to write this essay as a bit of a comment on one-person shows. Their value and pitfalls and etc etc. I found it really hard because there isn't really any consistency to them besides the fact they all feature exactly one (1) person.
“Another one person show, how original”.
I get it. I get why you say that. They really are everywhere. But behind every single one is a different, totally unique person who has squashed a metric fuckton of vulnerability down deep into their gallbladder to put a little bit of art in the world.
“They're just a self-centred 1-hour wank fest”.
I know a lot of artists and most of them aren't the fame-hungry, vapid, naive and fairy-esque stereotype people think they are. They're very normal, very beige people in most circumstances. In fact, I think all people are very normal, very beige people in most circumstances. But theatre isn't most circumstances. So I think it's fair to say every normal beige person has a right to the occasional self-centred 1-hour wank fest.
God bless the self-centred 1-hour wank fest.
God bless Dad Genes and Fruitcake.
Post-script:
It's Christmas now and I'm sitting on the train back to the city from Cragieburn. My editor Charlotte has looked over the work and given it approval. I've looked over it a million times and given it approval. We decided to wait until after Christmas to publish.
Yet here I am, on Christmas Day jumping back into a Google Doc to write about two shows I saw almost 3 months ago.
It should be simpler than it has been. Why is it so hard to write? I think about all the unfinished drafts sitting in untitled documents on my Google drive. I think about all the plays I started and never finished. The ideas that got invested into and never went anywhere. It's tiring.
When I finished my studies I spent like 2 years trying to get a show up. Invested money and time in developments and dramaturgs and script sessions. I think about all the work that went into the projects I completed in my graduating year. All the thought and effort and time and emotion that went into uncovering and exploring a theme, an idea, a play. All left on the stage.
“Create a good work-life balance”, everyone tells you. I don't want a work-life balance. I love my work. I want to get lost in my work for weeks, months, years even.
I don't want to get lost in conversation about the “value” of this work.
I don't want to get lost in the shame when I add up the hours I've worked in comparison to the money I've been paid and find an hourly rate in the low $0.001s.
Art is filled with so much shame and self doubt. It really shouldn't be. If there is any point to this essay I think that's it. There is nothing shameful about art. Make it, share it. Share the stuff you're proud of and the stuff you hate. Share the stuff that took you 5 months to write and the stuff you wrote in a day. Share the stuff that makes you money and the stuff that doesn't.
Let the shame wash out of you. Every time you do, someone watching, reading or listening has a little bit of shame wash out of them too.
Martha Latham hates art and thinks it should be defunded. She also thinks Myki inspectors should have guns. We really didn’t want her but we needed to hit our gender equity quotas. Find out which of those things are true @sad_goldfish.
This essay was generously donated by Martha.
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