By The Seat of My Pants - Maggie Nuttall's one woman show

BY THE SEAT OF MY PANTS :  True Stories of Wit & Grit

A One Woman Show by Maggie Nuttall

You hold up a mirror to most people’s faces and most of the time they don’t like what they see.  There’s the instant self-delusion that what’s there isn’t really there, and that everything is alright with the world, despite all the evidence to the contrary.  Most of us are like this: piss on my leg and tell me it’s rain because it makes me feel better about you pissing on me.

Not so with Maggie Nuttall.  When you hold up the allegorical mirror up to her face, you get the reflection of the truth of her self, tinged with humor, a measure of bravado, and a certainty that the things she sees are exactly as she sees them; she’ll tell you you’re getting pissed on, and who’s doing it.

Maggie’s one woman show By the Seat of My Pants runs through a series of short stories that build a calibrated tension from tale to tale where at the beginning you find yourself laughing at her description of being choked by a maniac on the subway; and then have an “awwww” moment as she reflects kindly on the gold-toothed, ghetto fabulous phalanx of urban youth who came to her rescue, and then carries on through the misty moment where Maggie finds acceptance and courage (all this in only one, minutes long story).  Expect sharp turns and stark contrasts at this show because reality is a series of contradictions that run to the harsh, and there’s no soft-soaping that here.  Though there’s a measured building up of tension in By the Seat of My Pants, the moment where the sharp storytelling turn comes, like an unexpected truck that’s going the wrong way through the tunnel as you move ahead confidently in your small sedan, Maggie brings you crashing into cringe worthy territory with a deft change of shocking, distressing words.  Are you ready?  Probably not…

Maggie is a tall, lithe woman who screeches, yells, and throws language at you as a counterpunch to her past.  At turns looking completely crazed in just the way the maniac who tried to kill her must have looked (a reflected expression of the attack) then suddenly perfectly calm and peaceful, she relates her stories to the audience with aplomb.  Not a self-centered person, Maggie tells the interconnected stories of her friend, sharing her friend’s own horrendous experiences, linking her own experiences to those of too many in the world.  Along the way you see clearly how complicit so many people can be when they cannot deal with harsh truth.  At a certain point you wonder if you yourself aren’t a part of the apathy in the world, and hope for the fact that you’ve never been complicit in anything so horrific.

 Through the flailing motions and verbal barrage of this performance you will find yourself at the center of silence, as your own thoughts just stop, and you experience Maggie’s psychic pain reaching out to touch you…and then she makes you laugh…and that’s when you really get to know this storyteller. 

By the Seat of My Pants is well worth the time, check the performer’s Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/maggie.nuttall) for any new showings, and when you go, expect the humor, conviction and the truth from Ms. Nutall, but leave the mirror at home because your own reflection will be cast by Maggie, as soon as she takes to the stage.  Don’t be afraid to look.

My review:  Go see this performance

Other reviews:  http://www.examiner.com/acting-and-performance-arts-in-new-york/by-the-seat-of-my-pants-true-stories-of-wit-and-grit

Justin Cronin's THE PASSAGE

THE PASSAGE by Justin Cronin

Publisher:  Ballantine

Year:  2010

This is a barnburner of a book.  And the beginning of a trilogy I can’t wait to finish.  Did I just give away my enthusiasm for THE PASSAGE?  I guess I did.  Cronin comes off at times as a literary writer, which is what he is (see previous literary book:  THE SUMMER GUEST, Dial Press, 2003, see Googlebooks for more), and infused throughout this vampire book are characters that suffer deep thoughts, dwell on personal intrigues, and ready themselves for battle against vampire hordes ready to make them extinct; which is where the literary gives way to high drama, and impressive action; and sometimes horrifyingly plausible end of the world scenarios (if all the vampire tales around the world are true, that is) .

Throughout THE PASSAGE we follow the survivors of the vampire apocalypse, first an FBI agent and his extraordinary charge, a girl with a deep destiny.  The agent, Wolgast, acts as a surrogate father, his past (and possibly some other unknown, unseen thing) spurring him to protect a girl he was ordered to kidnap by the government for a secret experiment meant to give the U.S. Military dominance, but which dooms the world to a bleak future.  Through Wolgast and the girl (“Amy”), and their shared bond we get to see the beginning of the end of the world as we know it.  Billions will die within years of an epidemic that no one is ready for, or can fight against.  And in the passage of just 100 years, the world has been pushed back into hut dwelling, pre-technological pockets of humanity who have learned to make, or fight, and in one instance, compromise their way into a life of desperation and living sometimes through a sheer force of will.  The scenes of devastation, horror, and the attempt to rebuild a stable society on small plots of land, are heart rending to read.  In a book about vampires, as expected, there’s a lot of death, and many of the dead include characters you started to care about.  But what else can you expect from war?  No one is safe; and though there’s a clear enemy, occasionally, I found myself feeling sorry for them.  Cronin is a deft writer at creating nuance, and making you consider things you may not have normally considered in such a tale and my sympathy for the vampires surprised me.

Cronin does a superb job of weaving vampire lore into his book, including the familiar vampire tropes of aversions to sun and garlic (even Dracula gets a mention); but more intriguing to me were the relationships that developed between survivors.  People hook up, plan futures, fall in love, make do, and have hope.  The day to day living, the need for food, the memories of people old enough to remember the past, or old enough to remember tales told to them about the past world ring true.  And at the end of this finely told tale, I literally gasped, and said, “No!” out loud when I realized that the last band of people in the book to reach as happy an existence as can be had at the end of the world still has me reeling and eager to read the next book…which comes out sometime next year, 2012.  Damn Cronin.

My review:  go read this book.