What I liked
Honestly, Madeline Jones is a charismatic enough performs and witty enough writer that the initial apparent premise of her show — a meta comedy sketch where she dances awkwardly with a frozen smile on her face while a prerecorded voiceover tells us her internal monologue where she has a suppressed panic attack about going up to perform with an incredibly half-baked idea for a show — would’ve been good enough if that were all she did.
But it serves only as a preamble to a raw and honest autobiographical talk about the absurdity of life as an underemployed aspiring creator in LA trying to cope with impostor syndrome by throwing yourself into things like Hollywood Fringe
Sure, there’s a lot that’s cliche and self-indulgent about doing a Fringe show about Fringe, and Jones even leans into that with her script’s nonexistent fourth wall directly addressing the fact that what she’s saying is aimed at a niche audience not only in terms of subject matter but in terms of the fact that she literally expects most of the people who come to her show to be people she knows.
And yet she has enough humor, specificity and sincerity to make the script feel like a real conversation with a real person the whole way through — a cynic might say that this piece is a satire about how a one-woman show is just an extremely elaborate and roundabout way to force your friends to listen when you talk about your life, but the piece ends on the earnest conclusion that really talking to people who are really listening is never a waste of time
What I didn't like
The flaws the piece is disarmingly upfront about are still real flaws — it does turn into a ramble that goes well over the advertised 15 minute running time, the whole premise is kind of navel-gazing and inside baseball, Jones didn’t actually seem prepared for an audience member who wasn’t someone she already knew (me)
But I will say that I don’t know her at all, don’t really expect to run into her again, but the ending of the show did have me walking away determined to start writing again when I got home, and that’s more of an impact on me than many other shows with bigger budgets and casts have had
My overall impression
A performer struggling valiantly with total writer’s block for her one-woman Fringe show just says “Fuck it” and goes full meta
