30th Edmonton Fringe Festival: Day One

Little Room: This intense one-man show, starring and written by Jon Lachlan Stewart, is a great introductory play to anybody wanting to know why you bother dealing with the Fringe Festival. Not surprisingly its a few years old now, as it harkens back to the 'good old days' of the early 2000s Fringe.

It has energy, a unique storytelling style, and emotional resonance as Johnny struggles with growing up and fitting into high school with the debilitating disability wherein he's...well, batshit crazy. Just not there enough to be on the fringes, but not out of it enough to require being placed in an institution, he instead gets the ADHD treatment (a brief anachronism, as when he was a child the condition was still dubbed ADD). Later on, he befriends another antisocial little lout and the two of them muddle along aimlessly. However, Johnny lives with a curse: he sees what he believes to be a day in his future. As he fights, feuds, falls in love, and tries to separate from his parents, that threat looms (very vaguely) over him until...well, it's a fringe play so of course there's a collision.

Well acted, well paced, and with only a few small technical flaws, Little Room is definitely worth your time.