Blacktop Highway pits theater and cinema against each other in an hysterically funny and disturbing dialectical tennis match between live performance and mediatized image. And as the title suggests, Fleck indeed does play all the parts – screenwriter, narrator, commentator / critic and all other characters, both human and animal in a tour-de-force that probes into the dark depravities of a strange family living in a dilapidated house along the coast of Maine.
Besides employing all tropes of the filmic genre Fleck also holds up a cracked mirror reflecting a mediatized and polarized American landscape experiencing what philosopher Jean Beaudrillard refers to as ‘Death of the Real’ where the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘simulation’ of reality has collapsed.
If you are a loyal Fleck fan, BACKTOP HIGHWAY will enchant and amuse you as he weaves his multi-media adventure. If you are an aficionado of experimental theater and theater of the absurd and even ridiculous, then you will enjoy this piece and find it well worth spending an evening with Fleck.
Fleck's smartly timed, perfectly pitched performance, filled with craziness, fun, and wisdom, keep us guessing. It's a real pleasure to see something as compelling and fresh as this wonderfully odd work.
I'll embrace Fleck's crazy vision of values any day, and hope in the last days of this production, everyone rushes to experience them as a good dose of reality in these days of delusion.
The return of John Fleck's astonishing solo performance piece, which he describes as a gothic horror “screenplay'd on one man's body,” is a 90-minute 3-D acid trip into wildly creepy absurdity. Here, with the help of Heather Fipps' Warholian video projections and Bosco Flanagan's eerie lighting, the master storyteller plays all parts, even mimicking the cries of all the exotic animals the tale's deranged and incestuous siblings keep in cages in the dark basement of their former veterinarian clinic transformed into a taxidermy studio.
Like Fleck himself, Blacktop Highway isn't easily categorized. And yet, after a week that included a shooting, massive wildfires, and a doctored White House video presented as truth, Fleck's exuberant phantasma made about as much sense as anything else.
Performance artist extraordinaire John Fleck owns the Odyssey Theatre stage with his one-man Gothic horror piece BLACKTOP HIGHWAY. Framed as a screenplay being shot through the camera lens of a movie director, Fleck makes maximum and inventive use of his talent for animal mimicry, pre-recorded vignettes and real-time videos paired with miniature props and puppetry. Randee Trabitz ably directs Fleck through his high-energy, fast-talking dialogue between Fleck and Fleck himself, in a multitude of characters.
If you are a loyal Fleck fan, BACKTOP HIGHWAY will enchant and amuse you as he weaves his multi-media adventure. If you are an aficionado of experimental theater and theater of the absurd and even ridiculous, then you will enjoy this piece and find it well worth spending an evening with Fleck.
Fleck's smartly timed, perfectly pitched performance, filled with craziness, fun, and wisdom, keep us guessing. It's a real pleasure to see something as compelling and fresh as this wonderfully odd work.
I'll embrace Fleck's crazy vision of values any day, and hope in the last days of this production, everyone rushes to experience them as a good dose of reality in these days of delusion.
The return of John Fleck's astonishing solo performance piece, which he describes as a gothic horror “screenplay'd on one man's body,” is a 90-minute 3-D acid trip into wildly creepy absurdity. Here, with the help of Heather Fipps' Warholian video projections and Bosco Flanagan's eerie lighting, the master storyteller plays all parts, even mimicking the cries of all the exotic animals the tale's deranged and incestuous siblings keep in cages in the dark basement of their former veterinarian clinic transformed into a taxidermy studio.
Like Fleck himself, Blacktop Highway isn't easily categorized. And yet, after a week that included a shooting, massive wildfires, and a doctored White House video presented as truth, Fleck's exuberant phantasma made about as much sense as anything else.
Performance artist extraordinaire John Fleck owns the Odyssey Theatre stage with his one-man Gothic horror piece BLACKTOP HIGHWAY. Framed as a screenplay being shot through the camera lens of a movie director, Fleck makes maximum and inventive use of his talent for animal mimicry, pre-recorded vignettes and real-time videos paired with miniature props and puppetry. Randee Trabitz ably directs Fleck through his high-energy, fast-talking dialogue between Fleck and Fleck himself, in a multitude of characters.
