Four Suns (out of 5)
Fear not, gentle Fringer. Vaguen has arrived to save you from the pain of knowledge. Vaguen, who was once Chris Gibbs of the Fringe favourite duo "Hoopal," champions, well, the power of ignorance.
The show begins in darkness with a voice rhyming off a list of absolutely unrelated topics. (He even gets into his shopping list.) "What do these things have in common?" he asks. Well, they are all connected by nothing but, of course, the power of ignorance. Vaguen then delivers his famous seminar on how ignorance can change your life. "If you don't know what isn't possible, then nothing isn't possible," he tells us. He even returns to the Bible to quote one Jesus Humphrey Christ who said, "They know not what they do." The basis of Buddhism, he points out "is the knowledge of nothing."
Vaguen did not come to his enlightenment overnight. He studied with the great ig-masters of the world and ignored everything they had to say. He even gives us our own power of ignorance ig-mantra: "Duh!" He tries to help us out by using hypnotism but, alas, keeps putting himself under before he reaches the end of the procedure. There are great pearls of ignorance here. "Ignorance helps when you try to explain why your country went to war." "What you don't know won't hurt you and so the ignorant man is invincible." Gibbs, (who benefits from the directing of uber-Fringe performer TJ Dawe) has the timing of cosmic clock, a subtle comic personality that finds humour in the smallest gesture and a fractured logic that can only come from a brilliant mind.Brilliant mind? Gee, sorry Chris. I blew your cover. Duh!
Colin MacLean
Edmonton Sun
