(To learn more about this show, please click here)

Performance 6/21/25 – Portland Stage TFK

You don’t have to be counting your decades old mistakes to experience the humor and humanity of this one. Really nice moments here from a brave and generous performer who takes you with him. This is the ultimate audition, funny, awkward, and heartbreaking. Check it out.

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

Please see this.

Fringe is, of course, a panoply of experiments. The glory of fringe theatre is that the audience generally doesn’t know what to expect. Likewise, the performers are often in a situation where they don’t quite know what they are going to deliver. While watching this show, I felt like maybe Mark Magee was in that space, feeling the audience join him in an incredibly successful experiment of comedy, confession, and pathos.

Go see this.

Under the premise that he is presenting an application for another ten years of life to some conglomerate of higher power(s) and/or some sort of death council, Magee presents his case that he should be able to live to be seventy. His early admonitions around his lack of ‘accomplishments,’ are hilarious, and his stammering, nervous demeanor invites us all to sympathize. We really are all thinking to ourselves ‘oh man, he’s not gonna make it. There’s no way this disambiguated council in the sky is gonna give this guy another ten years.’

See it.

While Magee’s timing is excellent, and his comedic delivery of seemingly throwaway lines really do deliver laughs, the magic of this show is in his transformation, as he relates more and more moments of his life, happy and sad. These stories become the bullet points on his resume, his ‘accomplishments’ amounting to nothing but perhaps the greatest accomplishment of all – being a human and feeling things. His argument for his continued existence is that he has felt life fully, and is still truly experiencing the beauty of it all, the mixture of hope and love, pain and nostalgia.

Seriously, when I say you’ll laugh and you’ll cry, I mean it.

Without spoiling too much, it’s worth noting that the cathartic finale of this show shows us a man that is still very much just trying to figure out what we’re all supposed to be doing here, but with a messy confidence that demands his continued right to exist. If only for the fact that he’s managed, for fifty-nine years, to be a real person that feels and loves and laughs.

Not sure if I mentioned this yet, but you should probably go see this. It’s a special show, the kind of thing that can only happen in theatre, and maybe the kind of experiment that can only happen at fringe.

Review Submitted on 6/22/25 by Allen Baldwin, PF25 Independent Review Team