Tonight I'm Gonna Be The New Me @ NAC
Pushes boundaries and won’t be pinned down
This short and snappy play sees Jess Latowicki shunt her relationship with boyfriend come lighting director come scriptwriter Tim into the spotlight for all the audience to blisteringly scrutinise. Tim sits awkwardly whilst Jess revels in the spotlight and hacks away at their relationship with brutal honesty. The show blurs the borders between what is happening in front of us and what is happening in Jess and Tim’s fictional world, giving it a fractious instability to match the state of the couple’s relationship.
Tonight I’m Gonna Be The New Me certainly isn’t a performance that bothers itself with convention. There’s Jess’s constant interaction with the audience, asking questions in a sickly sweet voice for them to answer as she directs. Or at one point Tim, at Jess’s screaming request, walking out of the auditorium to get her a beer, returning with Corona in hand which she swigs from a plastic cup. The play is framed by ‘dances’ (quotations here to emphasise the dubiety of this label), the first compromising fifteen minutes of Jess twitching, jerking and convulsing violently on stage whilst her hair billows in fan generated wind. The last – ten minutes of Jess simply spinning on the spot with her arms wide out backed by a blinding red light. The show also casts serious doubt on the viability and desirability of modern relationships, with all their conventions and expectations starkly thrown into turmoil.
Jess Latowicki dominates the show with an impressive act of physical endurance. She’s sexy, charismatic, chaotic and plays the psychopath girlfriend with chilling effectiveness. Her jokes are good but not great, and the play could’ve capitalised on the wealth of humour evident in the situation even better. But the performance was very entertaining, I loved its weirdness, its open-endedness, its complexity, and I think it would deliver different interpretations every time you see it. It pushes boundaries and won’t be pinned down, leaving audiences captivated and questioning.
