My overall impression
I know Take me to the Poorhouse travels to the 2013 United Solo Festival this fall and has dreams of further touring. The writing already impressed me at their living room reading. especially as I knew there were many solo shows in my near future of Fringe.
I was a little scared, honestly, because I loved the script so much and worried that ‘producing’ it might ruin it. Often a solo show would be just as good if it stayed as a story-telling piece rather than a play. Not the case here; Take Me to the Poorhouse works even better on its feet.
Femi is tight. Her story of class and love and mistaking real life for musicals feels close yet very distinctly far from my own experience. There’s a lot of distance between Nigeria and Massachusetts, but as Femi says in the Press Kit: “Many of us learn about other cultures primarily through the images we see, and the consequences are far reaching. For me, they were deeply personal and painful. As a young girl, I witnessed my identity obsessively portrayed in Western media as a poverty and disease ravaged child with a blank face–never as the vividly imaginative and quirky children that my friends and I were.”
There’s a lot of love and much care taken to bring Poorhouse to you. A child’s drawing very slowly and incredibly subtly becomes our only backdrop, and rightly so. Femi has no judgement on her eight year-old self, even when her actions turn the narrative dark. We leave with our own childhood impressions, our own way into her world – whether via Grease or Transformers or memories of our first crushes.
- See more at: http://losangeles.bitter-lemons.com/2013/06/09/lets-fringe-last-of-the-sneak-peeks/#sthash.PrErzz1c.dpuf
