About the author:

Mike CrisolagoMike Crisolago
I am a 29-year old Toronto-based journalist and writer who has a passion for theatre, literature, history and baseball...

Tags:

, Sara Hennessey, Sara Hennessey Town,

Share this article:

In many ways, Sara Hennessey Town bares a striking resemblance to the city of Toronto. And there’s a reason for that.

“A lot of comedy comes from being disgruntled and being unimpressed with something,” Hennessey, the writer and star of the Fringe Festival comedy, said. “And I walk around and there’s so many things that can piss you off in a day – whether it’s slow walkers or the smells or anything.”

Sara Hennessey Town, the follow-up to the hit 2008 Fringe hit Sara Hennessey Time, is a bit of a departure for the 25-year old Aurora-born comedian. While Time provided a showcase for Hennessey’s stand-up, Town is a one-woman sketch show featuring a variety of characters served up with an innovative and intelligent presentation.

“I wanted to take a lot of risks with this show. I wanted to be really creative and think of ways I could do things differently,” Hennessey said.

It’s clear that living in this city, as Hennessey has since she moved here at 19 to pursue comedy at Humber College, plays a large role in shaping her routines and endearing her to the local audience. Take, for example, a sketch inspired by the TTC about a woman stuck in a delayed subway train, who constantly repeats to herself, “The doors are still open.”

“How many times have you been thinking, ‘Why won’t [the train] go? Just why?’” Hennessey said.

The various sketches in Hennessey’s show might not sound very exciting on paper: a PowerPoint presentation about cats, a camper trying to finish a scary story, or the woman who’s stranded on the subway. But to witness Hennessey take such simple premises and twist them, as if squeezing every last drop of conventionality out of them, is truly an experience.

“Look at my bum-hole!” Hennessey offered as her impression of a cat while she mimed trying to pacify its erect tail. She then offered her human response. “I’m not going to fuck you!”

Hennessey has the ability to take the most banal of lines and, with her dead-pan delivery, make them fresh again.

“I’m going to need you to finish all my unfinished business,” she told friends in a videotaped will and testament in such a serious yet preposterous tone that not another word was needed to know the business wasn’t important enough to deem a taped request in the first place.

And then there are the clever touches that Hennessey adds to what begins like any other campfire ghost story scene. She sits on the dark stage with a flashlight under her chin, offering an evil scowl as she prepares to tell a chilling tale. But as successive characters enter and exit the sketch, Hennessey turns the flashlight off and on and positions it differently on her face for every character. She manages not only to define her characters – an angry pre-teen, a nervous friend, a bothersome mother and a bratty brother – by simply re-arranging the flashlight, but the sketch is so convincing that at the end one expects to see four different people get up and exit the stage.

Hennessey’s brilliance lies in her ability to dangle an idea in front of her audience, wait until they’re sure that they’ve seen or heard something like it before, and then completely catch them off-guard. As well, her comic timing – honed by stand-up on stages across Toronto – is flawless in nearly every sketch.

I’m not sure that one could find Sara Hennessey Town on a map of Ontario. But I can promise one thing, with its population of angst-ridden teenagers, quack doctors, and cats galore, will certainly be worth the drive.

Sara Hennessesy Town is playing at the Theatre Passe Murialle Backspace as part of the 2009 Toronto Fringe Festival until July 12th. For more on Sara Hennessey, visit http://www.sarahennessey.com/.

For Mike’s complete interview with Sara, including her favourite and least favourite things about Toronto, the struggles of a female comic and more, visit Mike’s blog Bastard Type.