My Autopsy - reviewer and performer share a single thought
Near the end of My Autopsy, Hamish Boyd, the writer and performer of this one man show, cries out: “Why am I putting myself through this?” It was a startling moment for me. The same thought had crossed my mind not twenty minutes earlier.
In the Fringe guide, this show is described as Deepak Chopra meets Spalding Gray. I don’t know much about Chopra but I was fortunate enough to see Spalding Gray on two occasions. Where Gray would sit and weave stories, Boyd bounces around energetically and performers. And I mean perform. Seemingly every noun is illustrated with a performance and appropriate sound effect. If a plane is mentioned, he stretches out his arms and makes engine noises. When he goes to a Jimi Hendrix concert, he mimics the Hendrix guitar-at-mouth routine. Whenever one of the seemingly endless dogs and cats in his life makes an appearance, we get to see his impressive ability with animal impressions.
Where Gray takes specific passages of his life to explore bigger themes, Boyd gives us, well, his entire life. Seriously, we start at the age ten and move through to fifty. There’s even a regression scene near the end where we watch him relive his childhood moments, almost as if he were double checking to see if he’d missed anything important that we should know about. If he’d been able to remember his birth, I imagine we would have had an impression of that as well: spewing, mewling and rolling around on the floor.
Where Gray seemed brutally honest (to the point where in the last show of his I saw, I came out despising the man for how he treated his partners), Boyd just gives us anecdotes of varying interest, loosely connected to some sort of spiritual quest. We see his obsessions with Dracula and Hollywood monsters morph into encounters with reincarnation and Eastern gods. I took My Autopsy at face value and assume that Boyd has really gone on these physical and spiritual journeys. That he has spent weeks – maybe months, maybe years – meditating on the nature of his being – and yet none of the real meat of this quest (such as it is) is revealed in this production. The most obvious question – why is he so dissatisfied with the reality that he’s been given that he hungers for answers in another – is never asked, let alone pondered. Boyd just rambles from one thing to another and then ends by sitting on the edge of an endless sea.
There was no program at the performance I attended, so I had to go to the Laughing Peace website to find out Boyd’s surname (and that the director of the piece is Fif Fernandes). I also found out that Boyd’s a certified Laughter Yoga Leader. No, he’s not from Vancouver. He’s from Alberta. Yes, they have them there too.
For more information on the show, a link to Laughing Peace and a place to write your own review transcend here.