"I was failing biology and biology failed me."
One of the downsides of fringing...
a) at the very end
b) with other people
...is that you're at the mercy of what the group wants to go see. While nobody in my circle has Chrohn's Disease, one of the girl's brother did and therefore we ended up spending Friday night watching Game of Chrones and trying to laugh at disease.
Play play features one of my least favourite tropes: "the story of my life". "Write what you know" is good advice and all that, but it also comes across as horribly narcissistic, which we all know arts majors are notoriously guilty of, but they don't have to remind us so effectively. Dan Rosen, helpfully styled as "Dan B. Rosen" fortunately gets that fact about him out of the way relatively early.
Growing up in Halifax, both of Dan's parents were doctors. He was the always seeking attention class clown, when suddenly he got hit by a debilitating illness that neither of them could work out. I'll take a brief aside here to note I know a girl (not one who attended the show) with two doctor parents and she's also diseased. Read into that as you will. Anyways, Dan (a balding guy who vaguely resembles Enrico Colantoni from "Just Shoot Me!") is constantly in hospital before discovering that what he has is Crohn's disease.
He goes into the dietary restrictions quite a bit which resonated well with those of us (most of us) who have diabetic family members who also suddenly can't eat the foods they like to eat. I counted five Game of Thrones references. I'm not a fan of the show, so there may have been more. Martok seemed to think there were a dozen, but I consider his input unreliable. The crowd generally ate it up (Dan had to smack down a brief heckling comment), as the fru-fru fringe crowd (especially on Friday night) really likes their poop jokes. Is it because of all the homos, they have shit on the brain so to speak? Who knows.
There were a few legitimate laughs, a lot of uncomfortable moments when he went into detail about medical stuff I don't like hearing about, He also yammered about "white privilege" because of course he does. For a guy who's been stuck in the hell of the Canadian healthcare system he didn't have much material about its failings: whether that's because he's as delusional about socialized medicne as all "white privilege" talkers are or because he never thought anything abnormal about his experiences, who can say.
For those interested in hearing a sympathetic tale of a teenager whose romantic and professional future was sabotaged by his own bowels, it's engaging enough. I didn't feel it though. Rosen's energy is just enough to keep you interested without being manic however, and except for the third quarter of the play really dragging and getting repetitive, it flowed well enough.
Flowed well. That insane far-leftist Fish Griwkowsky made a half dozen poop jokes in his review. I only made the one, and it wasn't even intentional.
Dan Rosen may become the public face of Crohn's disease, but I'll still keep typing "Chr" and having to correct myself until the day I become worm food.
