Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
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by Heather Marie Annis & Amy Lee, directed by Byron Laviolette
Up your Nose and In your Toes Productions, Toronto Fringe Festival, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace
July 1-12, 2015;
Best of Fringe, Toronto Centre for the Arts
July 26, 28 & 29, 2015
Morro: “I’m bleeding from the crotch!”
Earlier this year clowns Morro and Jasp unveiled their latest show Morro and Jasp: 9-5 in which they satirized the world of business. Now for the Fringe Festival they are reviving one of their most acclaimed pieces, Morro and Jasp Do Puberty from 2008. With Puberty the daring duo explores the extremely divergent feelings that physically becoming an adult can provoke and bring the once-taboo topic of menstruation front and centre (so to speak). An hour with Morro and Jasp will make you weak with laughter.
The show opens with a view of Morro (Heather Marie Annis) seated on a toilet and looking between her legs. She has had her first period. Aghast, she tries to soak up the blood and change her panties, but, suddenly when discovers to her dismay that a theatre full of people are looking at her, she has to tell us about the terrible thing that has just occurred. “I’m bleeding from the crotch!” she exclaims, hoping that repetition will somehow effect an explanation. She feels the onset of puberty has ruined her life. She can’t play soccer baseball anymore in her condition, and she definitely won’t be able to go to the high school prom with her teammate Stephen.
Morro’s sister Jasp (Amy Lee), though older, has strangely enough not yet had her first period. In complete contrast to Morro she is looking forward to it with great anticipation and has invested the process of becoming a woman with ritual grandeur. Her plan is to have the best first period ever. While Morro has a potential date for the prom, Jasp does not and contents herself by dreaming of the perfect date with Elliott, the young Leonardo DiCaprio of her school and enacting this date with her dolls.
The opposite reactions to puberty from the prim, precise but romantic Jasp and her more natural, raggedy but panicky sister Morro are funny enough in themselves. But the physical comedy that accompanies these reactions is priceless. You would never know how funny sanitary napkins and tampons are until you see the difficulties Morro has with them. Her first successful insertion of a tampon, after numerous hilarious failures, is accompanied by famous “Sunrise” music of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (think 2001: A Space Odyssey). This fanfare also accompanies Jasp’s vision of her ideal onset of womanhood and later Jasp’s rescue of Morro from the risk of toxic shock syndrome.
The hilarity of Morro’s physical comedy is balanced by the hilarity of Jasp’s psychological comedy. Jasp tops her fantasy of her perfect first period with her extraordinarily detailed fantasy of what it would be like to attend the prom with Elliott (played by a lucky audience member). Sisters spying on each other and discovering their terrible secrets is the kind of humour that transforms Morro and Jasp from clowns into multifaceted characters.
The duo’s paired views of physical disgust and imaginative rapture complement each other to create a complex picture of how teenagers react to the onset of adulthood. Morro’s desire to keep what happens to her body separate from her love of playing soccer baseball is like Jasp’s pretending to be seduced by her stuffed vegetable, a pea-pod named Peabody. In both cases the two are torn between innocence and the inevitability of new experiences. This melancholy undercurrent of the oncoming loss of innocence makes the comedy richer and our laughter heartier because the mixture of emotions is so true.
Morro and Jasp have secured a spot at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the mother of all fringe festivals, where they will take the current show. Canada should be proud of them, and I hope people will contribute to their Indigogo campaign to help pay their expenses to attend. Anyone in Britain who still thinks Canadians are boring will need only see Morro and Jasp Do Puberty to be proved hopelessly wrong.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Heather Marie Annis as Morro and Amy Lee as Jasp. ©2015 Alex Nirta.
For tickets, visit www.tocentre.com.
2015-07-01
Morro and Jasp Do Puberty