Apt613 is trying to see every show on opening weekend of the 2017 Ottawa Fringe Festival. Read more reviews at apt613.ca/fringe.
Gerard Harris. Photo by Andrew Alexander.
Gerard Harris: Attention Seeker
by Gerard Harris
75 min / Comedy, Storytelling, Standup / Mature
Gerard Harris has a healthy awareness of the challenges facing a one-man storytelling show. His crackling energy is on par with the all the Fringe favourites and he has the natural sincerity and desire to self-deprecate that’s required. His subject matter is primarily the struggle of a man who writes and sells jokes to standup comics who earn much greater success than Harris himself has ever enjoyed. True story. He tracks his ups and downs through the world of stand up and charts his own defeats, his parents’ divorce, his own divorce, depression, anxiety, or in his words, “all the worst things that can happen to a white middle class, heterosexual male.”
Harris’s narrative has some great lines and moments of real clarity and sincerity. He’s right to jokingly copyright a term as hilarious as “procrasturbating.” But the show, like Harris, is distracted and wandering in places. When rewarded with a laugh, Harris instinctively follows up with a second, third, even fourth aside that pulls him off script and leaves him lost in a tangent. The struggle to find his way back goes beyond the candid sincerity of storytelling and ventures into under-rehearsed. There are a couple of instances where I found myself filling in blanks left by plot points that were lost in Harris’s train of thought.
The use of a stand-up style mic to emulate his own comedy set had the potential to be a really clever bit of blocking, but it’s applied inconsistently and so lends to the distraction. I want this show to go through a rehearsal with a director who will drill the uncertainty out of Harris’s speech and whittle this down to a tight 30 or 40 minutes of material. On opening night, the show ran about 15 minutes over its one hour slot.
There is a solid set at this show’s centre and some real laughs to be had if that can be harnessed and focused. Let’s hope the Fringe circuit brings that out.
Gerard Harris: Attention Seeker plays at Live! On Elgin (220 Elgin St) until Sunday June 18, 2017. Tickets cost $12 online and at the door. Visit ottawafringe.com for the show schedule and box office info.
.gif)
