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Performance 6/20/25 – Mechanic’s Hall

Cracks was an intimate, frenetic story about a woman who tried so hard for so long to be the man she was told to be. Claire’s improv background is on full display as she stalks around the stage, dancing from persona to persona as she discusses the tribulations of how she grew up Catholic, attended a military high school, learned to to “Do the things a boy was supposed to do,” and eventually, painfully found her way to her true self. There’s a lovely theme of parade, pageantry, and ritual, and the ‘theatre’ that we create when we are asked to play roles we might not feel are right for us. There’s also a strong physicality to her performance as she takes us through the ways her body was asked to perform, from the proper way to make the sign of the cross, to the proper way to march and salute, to a final cathartic prop reveal that opens the doors for the next stage of her life. Genuine, passionate, and moving, Cracks is a memoir, a coming of age, and a coming out story all at once.

Review Submitted on 6/21/25 by Allen Baldwin, PF25 Independent Review Team

Performance 6/25/25 – Coffee By Design

Let’s set the stage real quick, One item: A “Compact Directors Outdoor Portable Camp Chair” by Embark in blue. This is the level of oddly specific detail this show goes into, and it is much appreciated. So going into this show you should know it is a sad story, and yet it’s a comedy show. You’d think the two should not go hand in hand, and yet Claire Lochmueller, the single actor in this entire piece, has figured out exactly how to combine the two. How? Well, this is Claire’s story. The entire show follows her journey to becoming Claire, it really is a beautiful piece having to do with being raised in religious and military schools and trying to survive this constant battle … I won’t delve too much into the story because that’s Claire’s job, however I will happily talk about some of the more technical elements that for sure hold symbolism with them. First off let’s talk about the lights – to my belief this show works in a way of almost-acts and this is shown via the lights. The lights will partly turn off to give us a partial vignette and then we would go right back into the show, and talk about how that section of story links to the continuation. It’s similar to reading a book and when turning the page and hitting the next chapter, the narrator will almost give some sort of quip about the last section and then more or less go right back into the story. Either way, I thought it was a nice little detail, that and the voices. The voices? Yes the voices, in the show to portray superiors or talking to someone else, they would use sound clips to be their voice. Which is a nifty use of sound but it got more interesting as the show went on. See during almost the entire show whenever there was a clip used, it would always be this very masculine voice, and primarily used in a negative context (not always but I noticed it more when it was)… and then, we get a positive use of the sound clips, it’s an actual productive conversation, and do you know what the voice was? It was a woman’s voice… It’s hard to express how powerfully that hit through little characters that make things called words on a screen. But just believe me when I say, it landed, and was very welcomed. But just know, in the end, it does thankfully work out, and there were many times where I thought this was going to have a sad ending, but it didn’t. It ended, with a smile on everyone’s face as we heard the words “Hi, My name is Claire, it is so nice to meet you.”

Review Submitted on 6/26/25 by Rigel DeLisle, PF25 Independent Review Team