📍 Buen Camino: June in LA
Stay tuned for performance announcements for Vermont, Edinburgh, Philadelphia, Montana, and Hawaii.
Much has changed in the last 6 months. This trailer was created before my significant rewrites. Please come see the new version of my show this June at the Hollywood Fringe Festival.
use the code FRIENDS at check out for a “pay what you can” option
If you’re wondering why you might want to see Buen Camino a second time, let me tell you: it’s a whole new show. This Buen Camino is funnier, scarier, truer.
Performing in LA and in New York City taught me a lot and I plowed all that learning into a complete rewrite. I’ve added new scenes, deleted others, eliminated characters I loved, and changed the ending entirely. I even decided to include the real magic that happened on the Camino. What if people think I’m nuts? Or more nuts?
On stage by myself, I feel the places where I must go deeper, where I’m obligated as an artist to say something truer, where I’m skirting being vulnerable and settling for being entertaining. I discover where I’m telling my audience something that would be far more powerful if I instead showed them. In the course of performing, I discovered how to make the show deeper, more honest, and scarier.
An example is the part of my story where I am in thrall to a cult leader who totally diverts my life. In my initial show, I rattled off a list of true horrors that were both horrible and hilarious in how crackpot they were. Although the audience got the picture, listing these things let them off the hook of seeing what actually happened. The problem wasn’t that I spared the audience, but that I spared myself. I bypassed the gnarly heart of the matter to avoid getting deeply vulnerable. As a result I cheated the audience of a deeper experience.
So, this time around I don’t rattle off much. In one new scene I take the audience into the dark baptismal chamber of an empty church and let them witness a fifteen year old girl in search of God standing chest deep in cold water in a wet t-shirt while her teacher baptizes her. Just the two of them. Alone in the dark.
That’s one rewrite of many. The version of Buen Camino I’m doing at Hollywood Fringe scares me. I’m as vulnerable in this new version as I know how to be. I’m also as self-deprecating and as funny as I know how to be.
I’m holding nothing back. I hope you don’t hold back either.
Come see it—either for the first time or again. In either case, it’s a brand new show.
Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90046
Thursday June 5 2025, 7:00 PM (Preview)
Saturday June 21 2025, 3:30 PM
Sunday June 29 2025, 5:45 PM
use the code FRIENDS at check out for a “pay what you can” option