After two years of touring her acclaimed stand up show, One Lady Rape About Comedy, Adrienne Truscott’s back at MICF with a totally absurd and funny show, One Trick Pony, a performance delivered in a deceptively haphazard tone and apparently scattered energy is also tightly controlled. Truscott has the capacity to be ferociously feminist while making it funny.
Previously, Truscott was one of the WauWau Sisters alongside Tanya Gagne. Their shows were always pretty rude, in fact one was called Death Threats and Other Forms of Flattery – a show which came about after the pair received literal death threats from a religious fundamentalist. Ultimateluy, Truscott hasn’t toned down an iota. Praise Be.
One Trick Pony opens with her crawling through the curtains on to the stage, lying face down on the stage and making the audience listen to Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars all the way through. The joke is on us. She’s dressed in a spangly burlesque number hanging from a coat-hanger across her shoulders and wearing a pair of oversized Mickey Mouse gloves. There’s a written introduction scrolling down a screen while we wait until the end of the song, and we’re advised to remember that wrestling is a motif of the night.
Truscott spends a bit of time on stage pretending to forget lines or, feigning that she does not quite know what’s she’s doing – albeit, she certainly does – taking pauses, checking the time left until the end, making the audience wait while she improvises and dissects her shtick along the way.
Plenty of self-referential post-ironic snippets, anecdotes and lots of ludicrous disparate bits and pieces are scattered throughout the show and come together most hilariously at the end. Truscott dedicates her show to her comedy idol, absurdist performer Andy Kaufman, telling us he never told a gag in his career. The straight comedy element in One Trick Pony is well-represented. It’s also packed with ideas that make you laugh and think. What more could you want? The world needs Adrienne Truscott – it really does.
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
