
Immortality
Reviewed by Hieu Tran
David Fairhurst’s Immortality is a wonderfully entertaining 70-minute show centering on one man’s existential quest for immortality. How so, you might ask? Well, through any standard, non-supernatural means he could think of: first striving to become an established writer so that his words and thoughts can be remembered, then trying out the idea of impregnating a woman so that his genes may be passed on, and finally flirting with the idea of assassinating somebody famous so that his name will always be remembered in adjunct.
In the abstract, putting on a show focusing on these issues might seem to be an “interesting” idea, but one would also need to have sufficient comic imagination to pull such a premise off. Fairhurst, fortunately, manages to do so, under the direction of Lisa Deo. He basically just sits on a stool and ruminates on many of the events in his life in a stream-of-consciousness flow, ranging from the coincidence that he was born on the same day that President John F. Kennedy was killed, to enumerating the ways in which he procrastinates while writing his masterpiece (two of my favorites are untangling a phone cord and cutting the plastic off of a windowed envelope so that he can put the plastic in one recycling bag and the paper in another). The comedy of the piece is supplemented by intermittent slides, many of which qualify a number of Fairhurst’s witticisms as being stolen from much more famous writers (e.g., Oscar Wilde), and the occasional sound-piece, voiced by as many as eight other actors.
Immortality works well, thanks to Fairhurst’s relaxed mood and the no-frills, seemingly just-scraped-together charm of the set. The show is playing at a converted art studio, with thirty or so fold-out chairs for the audience, a stack of plastic crates to hold up the slide projector, and an unevenly cut, white board to project the images against.
And even though the tone of most of the show is richly and darkly comic, a hint of melancholia creeps in near the end, as Fairhurst recounts the day when Bozo the Clown forever shook his father’s single-minded faith in the sense and order of things. If there is ever supposed to be a contemporary parable for existential dread, this might be it.
Reviewed by Hieu Tran
David Fairhurst’s Immortality is a wonderfully entertaining 70-minute show centering on one man’s existential quest for immortality. How so, you might ask? Well, through any standard, non-supernatural means he could think of: first striving to become an established writer so that his words and thoughts can be remembered, then trying out the idea of impregnating a woman so that his genes may be passed on, and finally flirting with the idea of assassinating somebody famous so that his name will always be remembered in adjunct.
In the abstract, putting on a show focusing on these issues might seem to be an “interesting” idea, but one would also need to have sufficient comic imagination to pull such a premise off. Fairhurst, fortunately, manages to do so, under the direction of Lisa Deo. He basically just sits on a stool and ruminates on many of the events in his life in a stream-of-consciousness flow, ranging from the coincidence that he was born on the same day that President John F. Kennedy was killed, to enumerating the ways in which he procrastinates while writing his masterpiece (two of my favorites are untangling a phone cord and cutting the plastic off of a windowed envelope so that he can put the plastic in one recycling bag and the paper in another). The comedy of the piece is supplemented by intermittent slides, many of which qualify a number of Fairhurst’s witticisms as being stolen from much more famous writers (e.g., Oscar Wilde), and the occasional sound-piece, voiced by as many as eight other actors.
Immortality works well, thanks to Fairhurst’s relaxed mood and the no-frills, seemingly just-scraped-together charm of the set. The show is playing at a converted art studio, with thirty or so fold-out chairs for the audience, a stack of plastic crates to hold up the slide projector, and an unevenly cut, white board to project the images against.
And even though the tone of most of the show is richly and darkly comic, a hint of melancholia creeps in near the end, as Fairhurst recounts the day when Bozo the Clown forever shook his father’s single-minded faith in the sense and order of things. If there is ever supposed to be a contemporary parable for existential dread, this might be it.