Fringe Fest 2013: The Effects of Time Travel on Neurotic Homos

A play about talking to your younger self

Three people are in a room together, but they’re actually different versions of the same person, aged 15, 25 and 35. They have no idea how they got there, or why they’ve been brought together. While they ponder this mystery they also pick away at each other: the oldest thinks the youngest is naive and the middle one repressed and dull, the middle one thinks the oldest is a jaded slut, and so on.

I wasn’t engaged with the characters (or the different versions of the same character), who were geeks (which I like), but sort of one-dimensional geeks (which I don’t like). The story didn’t really go anywhere: as far as I can tell, no version of this person learned much of consequence from any other version.

There are a few things that made the 90-minute time commitment worthwhile. The concept of going back in time and chatting with yourself was interesting. There were also several moments of real hilarity and the dialogue was consistently amusing in a quirky sort of way. And Nadene Schuster, who plays the 25 year old version of this guy, had great comic timing, fantastic rants about marketing (her character’s vocation), and brilliant comments about her cock and balls.

The Effects of Time Travel on Neurotic Homos

George Ignatieff Theatre,

15 Devonshire Place

Jeremy Willard is a Toronto-based freelance writer and editor. He's written for Fab Magazine, Daily Xtra and the Torontoist. He generally writes about the arts, local news and queer history (in History Boys, the Daily Xtra column that he shares with Michael Lyons).

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Culture, Toronto, Arts, Theatre

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