Six years ago I travelled to New York for the first time, an innocent abroad with only the clothes on my back, etc, etc. A friend of mine gave me the number of a friend of his, and that was how I ended up sleeping on Jenni Wolfson’s couch for most of the week. Although at that point I wasn’t house trained, she didn’t object too much, and I still see her whenever I visit NY.
The last time I saw Jenni, she was leaving her job at UNICEF (where she’d been for years) and had started to spend more time on writing and performing. The result is that she has now staged her one-woman show RASH, which has received great reviews, has been nominated for the Amnesty International / Big Issue Freedom of Expression Award, and is going to the Edinburgh Fringe this year.
I haven’t seen it (and I doubt she’ll be touring Montenegro) but the description reminds me of the play “Fever” by Wallace Shawn, which was an influence on me in the mid-1990s - a personal reflection on the friction between expectation and reality as you travel from the rich world to the poor. Political theatre is having something of a resurgence at the moment (and not just in New York), and if you’re going to the Fringe this year, RASH should be well worth going to.