Shows I Have Seen: I Heart Peterborough
I overcame my hatred of the verbing of the word “heart” to go to this show. I mean, clearly I love verbing nouns, but that one is just well overcooked by this point. Let it go. I Heart Huckabees was enough.
Unfortunately, I was ill rewarded. Not that it was a bad show, necessarily, but just that it’s exactly the kind of thing that I really, really don’t like. At all. It was the kind of show that a drama teacher who only had two boys sign up this year would love. All intense This Is A Play Mofos, and it’s got some Funny Bits, but it’s about some Well Serious Shit. Chronically overwritten, ninety seven percent intersecting monologues, rather than dialogue, way too self aware.
It tells the story of a gay, cross-dressing man and his teenage son who comes to live with him after a car crash kills his mother.
It’s slick, and well produced, so if you’re big on plays that know they’re plays and want to make damn sure you’re aware of it too, you’ll probably enjoy it a lot more than I did. I will say that Jay Taylor as Hew was bloody great, and there was a wig that made my own (really quite good) hair feel dowdy and insignificant.
