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| Susan Lieu (Brett Love) |
Over 140 LBS
Bread Crumbs
Left on Yellow Brick Road
ACT Theatre/ACTLab
Through February 16, 2020
ACT Theatre is producing its very first “Solo Fest” this
month, anchored by a show by Susan Lieu that Lieu has done several times,
in the area and then took it on the road to several other cities. Three other
performances are also included and this weekend, you can potentially see three
of the four, if you work quickly. Seats are limited.
Sherif Amin created Left on Yellow Brick Road,
for which the description reads, “When a boy from Egypt unexpectedly finds
himself in the Land of Oz, he travels to a place past the Emerald City where he
stays. Soon he starts to wonder, is it better to stay in Oz or find his way
back?”
Jasmine Joshua created Bread Crumbs which is
an exploration of how they discovered, over many years, that they were
non-binary. I have seen a couple of their iterations of this work and each time
it is interesting, emotional, revealing, and thought-provoking. I expect no
less from this outing.
Joshua’s journey encompasses the fact that they have twin
girls and a husband and also developed a drag persona named Harvey Gent for
which they now dress up as half Harvey, half themselves in a visual
representation of that exploration.
Lieu’s autobiographical show was generated by the effect of
the death of her mother from a botched tummy tuck by a doctor who should have
had his license yanked far before he met Lieu’s mother! Lieu was eleven. It was
entitled 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother. The weight refers to both
her mother’s and her own weight. Apparently, after her mother died, no one in
her family, not her father, not her siblings, not her aunts or grandparents,
wanted to speak about it. It was as if her mother poofed off the earth.
