Oct. 09, 2007 - Issue #625: We’ve got an election!
Some awfully embarrassing Stories
Actor and comedienne Sara Bynoe admits that after some seven years of sharing her badly written pubescent poetry—she has a regular open mic comedy night where folks share their high school writings, compiled a book of her findings, as well as written and performed the one-hander Fuck Off and Die: Tales of Teen Angst Poetry—with audiences across the country that she might have lost some boundaries.
“The first time that I did [Teen Angst Poetry], I could barely get the words out, I was laughing so hard I was crying. It was this total mortification and embarrassment and, ‘I can’t believe that I am sharing this with you, it’s so embarrassing,’” the Calgary-born Vancouverite laughs. “Now, I have no shame, I have no problem sharing these intimate details, and sometimes people are, like, ‘Whoah! That’s a lot.’ And I’m, like, ‘Sorry, I’m used to sharing everything with everybody.’”
Stories from Our Black Books—written for the stage by Barbara Pollard from Carissa Reniger’s collected dating tales of the same name—is somehow an inadvertent extension of Teen Angst Poetry, the next phase of self-referential humiliation, if you will.
“That’s why I was interested in becoming part of the project,” she explains. “Dating is sort of ... well, I have a project that hasn’t gotten off the ground yet—sort of after teen angst is the quarter-life crisis. It’s that whole, ‘oh, everyone’s doing something with their lives and what am I doing?’ It’s like teen angst with bills, and dating is a part of that. It’s verbatim theatre.” Told in a series of vignettes, Stories takes its audience on a journey through the trials and tribulations of women in the dating pool. And while Pollard is credited with writing the show, it’s also been a bit of a collaborative process. Bynoe and fellow castmates Denise Jones and Andy Thompson not only added their own flavour to some of the text, they added a few of their own stories into the mix.
With the play being billed as “taking ladies night out and putting it on stage,” there is a potential Sex in the City vibe going on here, and with it, the potential for things to be, how should we say ... “misandrynous.”
“I don’t think that it’s mean spirited. It’s got that same teen-angst catharsis. We’ve all been through it,” Bynoe counters. “I think that what I am doing, as a performer with this work, is not judging the characters. Whether someone is being really frivolous about their Gucci purse, or whether they’re having this intense stalker experience ... it’s about just trying to honour the people.” V
Thu, Oct 11 - Sun, Oct 28
Stories from our Black Books
Written & directed by Barbara Pollard
Starring Sara Bynoe, Denise Jones, Andy Thompson
Catalyst Theatre, $17
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