Fringe Play Reviews

Winnipeg Free Press - ONLINE EDITION

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

By: Novel by Dave Eggers, Adapted for the stage by Luke Falconer

Hired Gun Productions / Winnipeg, MB

07/18/2009 5:27 PM | Comments: 0 (including replies) Our Rating: Your Average Rating:

This one-man adaptation of Dave Eggers’ unconventional and wildly popular 2001 memoir is a work of staggering ambition based on the amount of memorization alone.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Fringe Festival

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Winnipegger Luke Falconer is able to bring the author’s self-mocking irony and emotional candor to life and connect with the heartbreak and bitterness embedded in the black humour.

For 60 minutes, Falconer becomes Eggers — a 20-something slacker whose parents die of cancer 32 days apart, leaving him to raise his kid brother, Toph. Rather than getting depressed, the brothers get even, "greedily cartwheeling toward everything we are owed."

If he seems to have an odd way of connecting with the audience at times, know that Falconer has remained true to the book’s bizarre meta-narrative, which turns in on itself and tricks the reader every chance it gets. And he’s done justice to its darkly comic, conflicted hero.

— Carolin Vesely

From the official Fringe program:

Based on the book that was number one on The New York Times bestseller list and nominated as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

Follow Dave on his journey from college student, son of parents who both succumb to cancer within a month of each other, to guardian by default of his seven-year-old brother, Toph.

Warnings: Language,
RECOMMENDED:
General Audience

60 min.

Tickets: $8
Discount Tickets: $5 for Orphans

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