By Jessica Taurins
In a normal world, shopping is pretty basic. Enter store, find item, spend money, go home.
But for Lena Moon, a simple need for a projector for her new apartment turns into a story so catastrophic it literally cannot be predicted.
Moon – known for her comedy writing, comedy performing, and Twitch streaming – absolutely crushes storytelling in their hour long MICF show ‘Rube Goldberg Machine’. Better known as a series of moving objects that shuffle marbles around in a comically complex way, or that thing from the ‘This Too Shall Pass’ music video by OK Go, Moon embodies a rube goldberg machine in many, many ways.
Moon’s self-deprecating humour – a confronting-but-not-too-confronting blend of humiliating stories and openly discussing her strange, obsessive hobbies – is welcoming and effortlessly relatable. Everyone’s picked up a hilariously overpriced kitchen item and made it their personality for a while!
Even the less relatable stories, like being peeped on during personal time from a ridiculous location, are told with such a fun flair that they could be stories from our own lives. Moon’s tight jokes and excellent timing bring everyone onboard with every wacky thing that happens to her. Of special note is a repeated lighting gag that only gets funnier on every go ’round, the stage swiftly switching from JB Hi-Fi Yellow to the stark white of whatever is going on in Moon’s brain as she runs away from the real plot on another funny little story.
Moon and her show are packed full of pop culture references, from the extremely timely (Severance! The Last of Us!) to the incredibly niche (an early 1990s ‘cool girl’ character for girls who couldn’t afford Lisa Frank!). But even for the most niche of memes, Moon’s open adoration for nostalgia from her past is infectious, and I’m sure everyone left the room feeling a little bit more groovy.
Of course, Moon isn’t all comedy, expertly weaving moments of existentialism through Rube Goldberg Machine. We all want to be remembered for something, whether it’s a eureka moment, or just for telling a great story. And luckily, Moon is a bloody good storyteller.
Does she get her projector? I’m not going to say. All I will say is that Lena Moon’s body is a machine that turns simple things into punishingly difficult, anxiety-riddled tasks, and that’s just… sigh… so very me.
