[NoHo Arts District, CA] – A NoHo Arts theatre review of A Transcriber’s Tale, written and performed by Joanna Parson, directed by Aimee Todoroff, music direction by Drew Wutke, and produced by Michael Blaha and Lee Castello at Hollywood Fringe Festival 2024.
I had never given much of thought to what kind of impact a transcriber’s job has on them. Think about it. They take audio, lots of news usually and turn it into written record. And while they do, they are absorbing every single word, no matter what the context, the content or the subject. One minute it’s a dog show, the next it’s famine in the Sudan or war or cancer or politics. It has to wear on a person. It has to burden the mind and the heart.
Joanna Parson’s experience transcribing in New York over the last couple of decades has been a mixture, to say the least. She is an actress, so she first took the job to make money in between roles. Waitressing had taken its own toll and she has been blessed with speedy typing skills. It seemed like a blessing, more money, your own schedule, no rude people leaving bad tips. But over the years it got tougher and tougher to remove herself from the stories she typed. Then came September 11th. She went to work because she had a purposeful role to play and she couldn’t do anything else. But imagine what she found herself writing about over and over again.
A Transcriber’s Tale is a real outlier for me this Hollywood Fringe. Joanna is a singer-songwriter of funny, observational songs and her comedy revolves around that enviable gift. So she peppers the show with musical illustrations of her moods, her victories, her lows and her highs. It has the effect of immediate intimacy. A few lines of a song can get you to a place that pages of dialogue often cannot. Something about the music and the way our brains work perhaps. But it can lift you or pull you along a path so quickly and so completely…there’s really nothing else like it.
Joanna’s story is about acting and working, falling in love and creating a life for herself in New York, she’s not a native New Yorker. There’s a richness to her writing and her performance. An ease to it that makes her affable and hilarious and trustworthy and heartbreaking all at the same time. Being in New York that year must have been impossible and yet impossible not to be there. Her experiences of that time are particularly poignant, but the play’s journey is a longer one that only that year, and the balance of the show is predominantly humorous and human and full of light.
She’s a bit of a marvel actually. A gifted storyteller, holding her guitar not as a shield but rather an offering. A gift. It’s a gorgeous gorgeous show. A delight. And Joanna Parson is absolutely brilliant. Bravo!!!!!
Where:
Broadwater Theatre, 6322 Santa Monica Blvd, Hollywood
When:
Saturday, June 29 at 3:00 PM