Solo Success

The The Slip-Knot has extremely funny yet deeply saddening tales of crappy jobs and troubled relationships familiar to us all. But it also has the most entertaining hallucination stories since Hunter Thompson and the most profound anti-consumerist rantings since Kalle Lasn. Even though you really couldn't ask for anything better than this, it also has an incredibly uplifting and sweet ending. This simply staged but intricately written one-man show is a very pleasant surprise and deserves to be the hit of Piccolo.

Canadian TJ Dawe brings to the stage the deliciously wordy, interwoven stories of three jobs, and more deeply, three periods of his life as a worker bee. "I am not an integral component," he realizes, "I am immediately replaceable. I am a single cog in a single wheel." He tries to find pleasure in life, a difficult task amid the mundane obligations of adulthood. He seems to, over the course of the show, arrive at the point in ordinary existence where a person realizes life doesn't get better, you have to make it better.

Dawe is a flawless performer, seamlessly going from one story to another, leaping in time and overlapping sentences and emotions with a fluid ease rarely seen in one-man shows. The stage is set with three differently colored lights, each one signifying a certain time in his life. He darts from the glow of one to the glow of another, sometimes just to give a snippet of something that will come up later. "I like jumping around with people's memory," he says. "I demand a lot from them." The audience does have to keep up - but it's not a chore; it's a delight. It seems the audience would have liked to stick around a couple more hours to hear him keep talking.

He takes a couple pregnant pauses during the show, which you'd think are for him to catch his breath; but people listen so intently to his often rapid speeches that Dawe says "the pauses are more for the audience."

People are on the edge of their seats, eagerly waiting to hear what will come next. Maybe they're waiting for him to trip up on his words, but it doesn't happen. He also acknowledges that "changes of gear are important;" after one pause he starts at a slower pace, dealing with the topic of nostalgia. It settles the crowd down for a minute until he dives back into a fast pace; it's like roller-coaster storytelling.

Dawe first noticed his amazing abilities as a storyteller in college. Even though he actually was discouraged by his acting professors, he realized that when he told stories at parties, people would shut up and listen to him. He was consistently passed over for roles in college productions, and in his fifth year, while finishing up an elective, decided to use his free time to start writing shows. Since then he's been a one-man fringe festival blitzkrieg and a prolific writer, having completed five other one-man shows, a screenplay, two vaudeville shows (as co-writer), cabaret scenes, last year's Piccolo hit 52 Pick-Up, and an adaptation of an Anthony Burgess novel. It's apparent that he loves words and the artform of elaborate, complex construction.

The Slip-Knot, although presented unconventionally, is an everyman story at heart which we can all relate to - "It's experimental, but not to the point where people don't get it."

Jennifer Corley
Charleston City Paper
June 6, 2002