By Darby Turnbull
As the Independent Arts scene splutters along being drowned with ever increasing funding cuts and venue closures, the Motley Bauhaus expanding to include the Wherehaus and the Spielhaus is a welcome life raft for our plethora of performance artists with a lot of talent and few places to go.
I’m barely exaggerating, the stage in which Yoz Mensch performs her solo show My Grandpa doesn’t follow me on Instagram is only slightly larger than the door Rose clings to in Titanic. A seasoned and award-winning Fringe Performer whose previous shows have toured Prague, Edinburgh and Adelaide, Mensch’s piece is a gentle gem with many well-timed guffaws in its 60-minute run time.
Several years ago, after the death of her Grandma Joy or ‘Ma, Yoz and her Pa took a multi week road trip together complicated by the fact that Yoz doesn’t drive, Pa isn’t a big talker and Yoz has begun transitioning and is yet to tell him.
Casually avoiding many of the tropes associated with the ‘coming out’ story Mensch delicately explores what it means to be an authentic person when you have to conceal an integral part of yourself; the hyper vigilance around your body language and careful self-censoring lest you give yourself away but paradoxically still maintaining a sense of integrity in your relationships.
There’s a wistful poignancy to Mensch’s recounting of this trip; in their own way they are meaningfully connecting but there’s a stark duality to the experience they’re each having and the paralyzing fear that Yoz’s revelation about herself is going to fundamentally alter that. Mensch gets some rye levity out of Pa’s hyper masculine non communication, where every joke is laced with an insult or a put down but she still infuses it with awkward warmth even as his barbs make her wince. When she asks who he’d cast as her in a movie he says Zach Galifikanis (I’d say a young Margo Martindale) it plays as an exquisite moment of tension where it could be a backhanded compliment or an affectionate simile based on some superficial physical markers (she had a beard at the time) but she lets audience see how these moments do hurt when someone for a myriad of reasons just doesn’t ‘see’ you. It’s hard enough being sensitive, creative and introspective with a lifestyle and values legions away from your elders and the ties that bind us are tenuous enough without adding something else that could very well break them.
However, the show is hilarious from start to finish, Mensch is an archly vivid storyteller with a strong sense of just how much funnier real life can be than most things we can make up. Much of her narrative is intermixed with multimedia insertions made up of the Vlogs made on her trip, we get small glimpses of Pa, the stunning countryside, the mad hotels and most notably a series of voice messages where she ‘auditions’ to play Pa for her brother as she finesses his voice. She gets much mileage out of the eccentricity of Scottish Hotel professionals and the incomprehensibility of their lay outs; I’ve only spent three days in Edinburgh myself and my experience was almost identical.
Yoz mines all the discomfort of the situation with quick wit and the mordant sense of mischief in having a secret and being able to share the ironies with her audience. A trained clown, she’s exceptionally skilled in converting truth through outsized gestures and the strength of her personality. I can only imagine what she could pull off with more space and technical opportunities but as it is there’s incredible charm in having her inches away from us, practically on our laps; in our own way recreating the forced intimacy of the confined car.
Like life, Yoz’s story resists linear resolution or catharsis; she states early that the natural ending would be for her to come out at the end of the trip but that’s not how it happened and life goes on but it doesn’t make the experience less authentic.
I’ll confess I’m frequently resistant to autobiographical shows, frequently finding them naval gazingly curated, but Yoz Mensch’s show is a glorious exception. Intelligent, tender and resonant with a vast array of laughs; from chuckles to gut busters, she’s a talent to follow.
My Grandpa doesn’t follow me on Instagram will have closed by the time this review is published but hopefully she’ll be lured back for a follow up season.
