In Progress: Adrienne Truscott THIS

Adrienne Truscott’s Bessie-nominated work THIS is propelled by both blistering satire and choreographic composition as radical tools for capturing and holding an audience’s attention. Truscott mines her own genre-straddling oeuvre—as comedian, choreographer, cabaret performer, performance artist, and activist—in a brash, non-linear confessional that bounces from contemporary feminism to the presidency to unconventional urban living. THIS is a solo performance that may not always be a solo; it is a dance that may not be a dance; it is a comedy that may not always be funny. It is a performance of writing (and reading) that alters to reflect the moment at hand—the venue and location, the current news cycle—and to reflect the experience of time as it is transformed by memory and embellishment, intention and execution. It plays with assumptions about authorship, linear narrative, truth, fiction, failure, and autobiography. Maybe, like it or not, performance is just another form of memoir, and maybe that fact is weird. THIS tries to make a piece of art about trauma while being traumatized by the inadequacy of making art in the current political landscape. Treating both her monologues and the theater as a kind of choreography, Truscott stages her selfwith impeccable timing.