Trilogy (plus one) rundown

So yesterday I did a thing that I’m not sure has been done before. Four separate and different solo hours! It was an amazing experience. <br><br>The ABC commissioned my Trilogy (Savage, The Resistance and Empire) so I performed them as one long three hour show, a one off event during the Melbourne Comedy Festival, which meant that I also had my regular (new) hour to perform that night. If I’d thought about it properly before, I might have cancelled the regular show that night but by the time I’d thought of that I had already sold a bunch of tickets, and then the idea of doing it as a marathon artistic challenge caught my imagination. <br><br>So, how did it work? Can you do four consecutive hours of jokes and story in a day (with fifteen minute breaks)?<br><br>The answer is... almost! <br><br>I was happy with the first and last of the shows I did. Savage and ETHOS. <br><br>The middle two were carried by the energy and good will of the audience, and worked better as standup than they did as narrative (mainly because I messed up the order), but I had expected it to be the opposite.<br><br>It’s a big ask for people to laugh at three hours of the same person’s jokes, and the audience very much delivered in a way that will make the final edited product work as both narrative and standup. <br><br>The story is as follows. I wrote Savage, which meant a lot to me. It follows the question of whether it’s possible to write comedy amidst tragedy - whether Comedy should be a distraction from sadness, or a way to approach things that are unsayable. The narrative line is loosely based around an encounter with an acquaintance who, when I bumped into him on the way to visit my mum in the palliative care ward, said something that was (to me) inexplicable and infuriating, and in that encounter, I walk away from the conflict in confusion and rage. The themes are faith and doubt, love, the unfinished, beauty, art, death and loss, and whether things that are very sad can also be very funny, or not. <br><br>The heart-line is “only the unfinished can contain the infinite...”<br><br>The Resistance was written as a sort of answer to the questions raised by savage, first, what is the difference between Comedy and tragedy (my answer being where you begin and where you end the telling of a story). The narrative follows my paternal grandmother, and her generous spirit (and non-PC approach) to helping people. Those people’s stories are followed to the point where they are no longer comedic, and into the reality of what it is to be a good person. It’s about the difference between being a good person and *seeming* to be a good person. The crux is an encounter I had with a lady who was choking her son in the street, and in that instance I stepped in awkwardly and stopped her, though I couldn’t change the world in a real way. The themes are kindness, damage, surface appearances, virtue signalling and discomfort. <br><br>The heart-line is “everyone has a reason”<br><br>Empire was the third. By this time I realised I was writing a trilogy, and again the central inciting incident was a conflict. I was confronted by the fact that a member of my mum’s family thought of my father as a villain when an incident occurred at a family funeral. In that instance, I finally step up and confront the situation, standing up for my father who (like his mother) always did what he thought was right. His ‘goodness’ is the calm and unyielding non-conciliatory kind, in a world where being fun and feeling righteous can erase the reality that being good means being present in hard situations. The themes are villainy, the stories we tell ourselves and rewriting the past. <br><br>Keep an eye out for the trilogy in the next few months. I’ll give my patreonites early access.<br><br>Lots of Love<br><br>Alice