Fringe Day 5, Part 3 - August 10, 2004, 8:30pm

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Claire Simonson
Intermedia Arts

Remember those conversations you had with your friends in college? The really good ones? Those conversations where you shared the important stories of your life, coupled with all the new things you were learning and trying to incorporate into your emerging adult self, all angling somehow to find your exact place and purpose in the world, the universe?

Those conversations continue to stick with me, even if the people themselves are no longer in my life. They were defining moments when my eyes were opened and I truly saw myself, and what I was capable of. They were terrific, and they were terrifying. But they were great.

This show is like one of those great conversations.

I know the artist from whence this show springs. She has a long and award-winning history in both theatre and film - from Red Eye to the Walker Art Center's women film directors series (three times) to film festivals and competitions throughout the country.

What's up, you might ask, with the title? It's the title of a book that has followed the author/performer around for many years now. And it's a concept that cracks the show wide open and, rather than making it more cerebral, makes it that much more understandable, relatable and human.

There's not much on the stage - a projection screen on the back wall, a ladder, a couple of mounted mini-camera gizmos (one with a seat, the other pointed at a long roll of white paper on the floor which is slowly unreeled throughout the course of the show - sort of rudimentary animation). That roll of paper is a companion to the narrative Claire Simonson unspools before us - both monologue and drawings take us back and forth, from past to present, from the interior of the mind to the wide night sky at the end.

The show is funny throughout - a self-deprecating humor that keeps the performer from taking herself or her subject too seriously, just seriously enough. The most broadly comic moments arrive in the form of enormous close-ups projected onto the back screen - close-ups of Claire, of a figurine of St. Claire [patron saint of television - I'm not kidding], and the infamous red Devil Duckie in a battle for her soul (all of whom are also featured, in more normal proportions, in the show's publicity photo).

This show is as touching as it is funny. It is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. This isn't someone gazing at their own navel and expecting us to find it interesting, this is an author and a performer with something compelling to say. This is the kind of theatre I don't see enough of the rest of the year, and the kind of theatre I go to the Fringe to see. This is a show that delivers.

Catch one of her remaining three performances - including (tonight) Thursday, Friday and Sunday. Go to the show's Fringe page and add it to your schedule. And if you like it, post a review and tell your friends. This show deserves a wider audience.

(For more of my writing - plays, past blog entries and more - visit www.matthewaeverett.com)