Monsters In The Wood

Monsters In The Wood, my solo show which debuted at The New York International Fringe Festival and was then extended to the Encore Series, recounts my families long   history in the Meth Amphetamine industry and the violent deaths that result. And it’s a comedy. That’s not a joke, it really is funny. That sounds so wrong. Fortunately, that is why they make glowing reviews like the ones below.

There will be more shows and Monsters related projects coming in the future and I will post all that info here.

AND to prove the above point – Currently working on a book version of Monsters. It will be much expanded and, hopefully, even more entertaining! Will keep you posted on the progress of that project. In the meantime we have this preview video. Enjoy.

Recommended shows Fringe Binge 2008

Monsters In The Wood

* * * *(four stars)

Cowering like a “white trash Bill Bixby hiding his curse,” writer-performer Brad Lawrence employs vivid metaphors for his rural Missourian adolescence among the rednecks; those title monsters happen to be his relatives, many of whom meet with stupid, violent ends while the boy seethes with embarrassment and plots his daring escape. Lawrence, besuited and sharp-tongued, perhaps passes too well for a New Yorker these days. He needs to better use his body and twang to fill up the empty stage with transformation. Still, this is a brave, honest work, mapping out the “mountain of hate” that lurks under more transplants than we’d care to know.

Joshua Rothkopf – TimeOut New York

Aug 8, 2008

Brad Lawrence calls Monsters in the Wood, his one-man, precision-sharp skewering of his Ozark roots, “A Comedy About Death.” At the start of the show, he places us in a funeral parlor featuring not one, but two caskets containing relatives, one of whom is reposed with enough Harley-Davidson regalia to make the casket look like an HD gift shop. Turns out, he never even owned a bike. Candid, scathing little jewels like this are revealed about family member after family member, and a shocking number of them do not make it to a ripe old age as the stories lace and interfold—when you live in a small town in southern Missouri, you will appear as a principal character in the lives of most everybody in town, and with the fairly limited marrying pool, most likely as a relative.

If you haven’t guessed, Brad Lawrence comes from “rednecks.” It’s the term he uses—these are not gentle, rocking-chair-on-the-porch yarns about crazy good ol’ boys. For one hour on a bare stage, he has nothing but his dry, harrowing sense of hubris to hold the audience, and he is fascinating unquestionably. There is no twang in his voice, except and only upon the instant he flashes it on with the harsh authenticity of someone making a point. Humor is his primary angle throughout, but the edge of it demarcates a deeper, darker place of alienation—an unwillingness to hygienically sieve hypocrisy and baseness out of his family’s tragic story details, and a gritty acceptance that total escape from his origins will never be possible.

Lawrence, under the deftly light director’s touch of Burke Heffner, uses only the bare minimum of lighting and staging to set up details—the focused emphasis of his perspective paints a perfect picture in our minds. As he walks us through the funeral parlor packed with family members who have brought beer inside successfully, but not other prized possessions (”You will NOT bring those dogs inside!” his mother is forced to command one funeral attendee), he maintains a hilarious detachment that skillfully sets this show beyond many solo stage memoirs I’ve seen in Fringe festivals past. Audiences at such shows are often unable to match the performer’s earnest fascination with his own life, as though having a life story were somehow unusual. Lawrence, in contrast, knows when to stay out of the way of his own narration, and allow his characters to be more prominent than himself. It’s the mark of a seasoned storyteller. Even when he reveals how his own identity was formed by a youth amongst such people, he does so with humility, using humor to stay in relation to the audience. The journey he leads is not intent on celebrating his own specialness, but on captivating through its everyman, “stranger in a strange land” quality—a Gulliver’s Travels of the Bible Belt.

Mathew Trumbull – NYTheater.com

Forget about the death rituals of other cultures – just understanding the way different Americans cope with the end of life can be a full-time occupation. But it doesn’t have to be an entirely somber one: Brad Lawrence proves in his one-man show Monsters in the Wood that death can indeed be a laughing matter.

Well, sort of. Lawrence’s tale of growing up in self-destructive Southern Missouri, which has been suavely directed by Burke Heffner, is rife with ironic commentary about the “good ol’ boys” who were his family and friends, and the time-bomb life he narrowly escaped. He finds plenty of humor in rattling off the torrid details of his relations’ relationships, how they affected him, and how he affected them in return, his straight-backed, aloof manner and deadpan delivery providing dizzy and ditzy contrast to the background he claims but suppresses with every impeccably chosen vowel he utters.

Lawrence can’t, however, ignore or hide the undercurrents of disappointment, pain, and loss that have led him to this point, and it’s those that give him and his play the humanity that identifies them as something more than self-concerned ramblings of a reformed redneck. Even Monsters in the Wood’s funniest moments are tinged with an inky bleakness paying heed to the mortality his upbringing so openly taunted. Lawrence opens the play at a double funeral, then expounds on the lives of the deceased and those closest to them – and then on those people’s deaths as well. For those Lawrence knew in the Ozarks, death wasn’t just the end of life – it was the way of life.

For many, the political implications will be obvious. But Lawrence avoids addressing them directly, and instead focuses on the personal details that give him the authority he needs to define himself as (in the words of a troubled girlfriend) “always a stranger in a strange land.” Of course that’s what he is. But his story terrifies as it entertains because it reminds you that on some level, none of us is any better: However we may appear on the outside, we’re all running from something, to something, or perhaps in circles. If dying is hard and comedy hard, being honest about yourself must be downright impossible. Lawrence, however, makes all the three appear equally effortless – and important.

Mathew Murray – talkinbroadway.com