011 Contemporary
Comedy – New
I found A Sudden Surge by Jack Dickson slightly
irritating to start off with; a hard, monosyllabic middle-aged Scotsman finds
out he has prostate cancer, but they’ve caught it early. He agrees to try anti-androgen therapy, which
has some unexpected results: he
expresses his feelings, cries a lot, hugs people, calls his grown kids for the
first time ever, joins his wife’s book club, gets his manly men friends at the
pub to talk about their feelings (including one man confessing not only is he
gay, but he loves Leonardo DiCaprio’s films and has bought Leo’s underwear on
eBay). The problem is that Gary’s wife
is not happy; he has gone from one extreme to another, and she feels like she
has been carrying the marriage for the last 26 years. However, it ends on a hopeful note. By the end, I was won over by the warm,
just-go-for-it performances and the gentle humor.
I didn’t
quite know what to expect from Lenny Henry’s Rogues’ Gallery, short (almost monologues) written and performed by
the comic, but they’re very funny and very witty. In the first story, “I Never Forget a Face,”
the speaker was a blind Black man from Birmingham who was having the worst day
of his life—he’d just been mugged by a creep who thought nothing of beating up
blind people. It was very funny, felt
very real, was very radiogenic, and actually had a happy ending. Marvelous!
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