What I liked
n/a
What I didn't like
n/a
My overall impression
Tom McAteer is in for Fringe from Canada and has just one show remaining, tonight at 6:45 at The Stephanie Feury. As noted in my review below, it’s dark and not for the faint of heart, but I highly recommend THE EASTER BUNNY for it’s visceral live experience.
REVIEW:
I find police interrogation tapes—of criminals who are guilty—fascinating. From the spoken lies and denials to the covert truth of body language, the study of the active, and perhaps irredeemable, criminal mind is at the same time revolting and riveting, and, sadly, so so so necessary as we learn to protect ourselves from, some may argue, ourselves. In The Easter Bunny, Tom McAteer embodies a walking, talking very disturbed criminal mind so well that there were moments when I wondered if he might not actually be something of a veritable sociopath who’d been driven out of acting class after acting class because he wouldn’t let go of wanting to discuss and perform about such dark issues as sexual assault and thus spilled onto a Fringe stage to carve his own path into the entertainment world, or, perhaps, more frighteningly so, into one of us in the audience, like a broken bad Tommy Wiseau. But, happily, I was very wrong. What unfolds on the Stephanie Feury stage is a live action doctoral thesis on the sickness and dangers that lurk in the minds and cold hearts of an all too large percentage of the world’s men. As stated by our in-character/narrator-of-himself at the beginning of the show, there is no graphic language, no graphic images, and no shameful or undignified reenactments of sexual violence during the show to get the point across. And they weren’t necessary, as the narrator calmly talks through real-life scenarios and well-researched statistics to build a foundation of inescapable societal violence that is as formidable a foundation as any of the aforementioned images or stagings could have been. As he moves through a slow and steady unpacking of the tools of the violent trade, it becomes clear that he is a portraying a perpetrator, with deeply aware knowledge of himself, who is lying in wait for his next victim, a repeated process that he/violent men are mostly unable to change. This show is not for the faint of heart—ironically—because McAteer’s performance is so damn good and so damn believable that it is actually discomforting. But I highly recommend girding up to experience it because we need to be kicked off of the sofa on this topic. We do have the capacity to view about it. We watch Dateline after Dateline, SVU after SVU, film and streaming series after series, Shakespeare play after play that depict and discuss violence, often beyond or imagination, to the point that we may be turning numb to it. I’ve seen several guns on stage at the year’s Fringe already. Saw a show a few nights ago that projected a slide portraying four dead bodies in the backyard of a serial killer. No one blanched. The Easter Bunny gets to the core and might make your blood run cold. That’s a true theatrical experience. And don’t worry, it’s June, so you’re blood will warm back up as soon as you hit the Melrose Ave. sidewalk, and you’ll be able to complain about the summer heat once again. Highly recommended. Richard Lucas – Asylum Judge
