RESPITE
14/02/2014 - 16/02/2014
Basement Theatre, Lower Greys Ave, Auckland
29/09/2015 - 03/10/2015
Production Details
In mid 2011, after four days of intense anxiety, Eamonn spent half a week in a Mental Health Respite Centre in Addington, a suburb in south Christchurch.
In an attempt to turn this experience into some sort of ‘coming of age’ moment, he wrote a short story about it, now another year on he has turned this short story into a monologue. Unfortunately this coming of age moment has no love interest, no wise mentor, no huge epiphany and he was five years too old to come of age.
Eamonn Marra is a comedian and writer living in Wellington. He has performed his solo show Eamonn Marra/ Everything Else in Wellington and Christchurch. He appeared in We Just Want People to Like Us with Alice May Connolly, and opened for veteran comedian Raybon Kan, in the 2013 New Zealand International Comedy Festival. He is 23 years old and is about to start his sixth year of his undergraduate degree.
Everything is sad and funny and nothing is anything else.
19 Tory St Gallery
14th, 15th, 16th February
7pm, koha
bookings: email eamonnmarra+fringe@gmail.com
Basement Theatre, Auckland
29 September – 3 October, 2015
Theatre , Monologue , Comedy ,
45 mins
Extremely Interesting Stranger
Review by Tim George 30th Sep 2015
I once knew a man who dabbled in filmmaking. His dream was not to win awards or make money. His movies were far too niche and esoteric for that. His dream was to reach a tone. He called it ‘tragic ecstasy’ — a perfect symbiosis of tragedy and comedy, the tone of the human experience.
Rather heady stuff, but that phrase was all I could think of while watching Respite, Eamonn Marra’s extremely funny and rather touching monologue about his battle to maintain his sanity in a world of natural disasters and non fair trade bananas. [More]
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
Winning the empathy vote
Review by John Smythe 15th Feb 2014
It’s intriguing to contemplate what makes this 45-minute effort so absorbing and funny. The truth of his story has a lot to do with it. The fact that the survivor of his own self-defeating state of mind is telling us this is testament to the ‘happy ending’ implicit in the very existence of Respite.
Eamonn Marra’s story of his own late-blooming ‘coming of age’ is simultaneously funny and dark. How does a boy from Christchurch cope with trying to live an ethical life, let alone skinheads, earthquakes and Hoyts Riccarton Mall? It can all come to a head over which bananas to buy …
It’s not so much a sympathy vote he wins from us but an empathy vote. We can all relate to his experiences and dilemmas, either in a ‘been there thought that’ kind of way or on a ‘there but for the grace of some greater force go I’ level.
Marra is generous, first with the bowls of chippies he provides and then with the compelling details of what he has been through: details that may on the one hand seem small but on the other attest to the authenticity of experiences some of us may not have had, for example at the hands of police or the mental health system.
Indeed whether he’s talking about navigating his way through earthquake-stricken Christchurch or settling into his Respite facility, it turns out the ordinariness of some of it can be as debilitating as the overwhelming inability to get a grip and take control of one’s circumstances.
Generosity reciprocated with a koha (which may, by the way, help resolve his dental issues) will be rewarded with a copy of his ‘zine’ entitled Everything is so sad and funny and nothing is anything else, full of even more writing gems.
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
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