The Emegency Monologues
Created by Morgan Jones Phillips
Produced by Drinking Well (Toronto, Canada)
Content notes: Described performance, Mature language, Violence, Mental health
By Bruce Burwell
Morgan Jones Phillips is a Toronto paramedic with a great sense of humour. Maybe you need to have a sense of humour to be a paramedic in downtown Toronto for 20 years. Or maybe, as Morgan sings at one point, you need to be ‘dead inside’.
Morgan starts the show by spinning his giant ‘Wheel of Misfortune’ at the front of the room. The wheel has 40 something (Morgan hasn’t counted them) stories of incidents that he’s experienced over the course of his career. Many of his EMS incidents are gory and feature all the major bodily fluids. The wheel is spun again and Morgan tells us the next story that gets hit. For better or for worse, the wheel dictates the show.
I was slightly worried about coming to a fringe show that Morgan has been doing for at least 10 years. Would it still be fresh? Would Morgan have morphed into some sort of slick Vegas style performer of his EMS stories?
Turns out, I need not worry. Morgan comes off as a totally vulnerable and relatable kind of guy and his show is not slick at all. That’s a compliment! He even slightly messed up a couple of his bits to convince us that he’s not too polished.
And he is likable. He brought his own ASL interpreter just in case anyone needed it. His daughter is a Carleton student and she strummed guitar for him while he sang a couple of his EMS songs in the middle of the show. His son was in the audience. One of his songs was a sincere love song called ‘My Baby Is a Crack Smoking Whore’. How can you not like this guy?
There isn’t much point in telling you about any of his stories since the wheel will pick different ones for you. But I am sure that the anecdotes you hear will be a nice mixture of grisly, hilarious, moving and heart-warming.
The opening show was a sellout and there will be many more sellouts this week.
The Emergency Monologues is playing at Studio 1201 until June 25, 2023. Visit ottawafringe.com/fringe/ for the schedule and box office info. Read more reviews at https://apt613.ca/category/festival/fringe/.
.gif)
