WORDS: LOLA BOORMAN
GRINDR / a love story, a new play premièring at the Dublin Fringe Festival and written by rising spoken word artist Oisin McKenna, is one of the few low-budget, experimental productions in Dublin which is not struggling for media attention. This is partly due to McKenna’s claim to fame as co-founder of the innovative performance poetry company PETTYCASH, whose party-centred poetry slams and spoken word evenings at the late great Little Green Café have dazzled and inspired many an ambitious student and downtrodden poet. It was during these PETTYCASH performances that McKenna first began his development of GRINDR, his second spoken word play after his début with Writer/Performer/Salesman (A New Play About Retail).
It is not at all surprising that someone who satirizes and scrutinizes media and pop culture as succinctly as McKenna has no problem in creating a hype. So much so that when I caught up with Oisin and his co-star Matthew Malone after the show, Malone joked “everyone thinks it’s a one man play.” GRINDR is anything but. McKenna plays 21-year old Johnny, a gay Dubliner looking for love and retweets, hopelessly and heart-wrenchingly bound up in the technology which keeps him isolated. Malone is narrator, app, MC, conscience, chorus, and voice of insight into Johnny’s predicament. Both performers have approached this project from different angles; as Matthew satirically adds “Oisin is the poet, I am more the ac-TOR”. This undoubtedly shows in their performance. Oisin’s stage presence is entirely unique and nuanced, his rapid speech style and awkward, unbalanced intonation is very fresh; it catches the audience, draws them in, and makes them at once uncomfortable and sympathetic. Matthew is a welcome contrast. His range adds a welcome depth to the narrative, he accentuates the comedy with his flawless timing, and, as a result, he becomes the entire world within which Johnny exists. Both actors agreed that the play required much experimentation and thought before they finally got it right, both having to learn the trade of the other in order to create this fusion form.
In a way, the partnership of Malone and McKenna is a microcosm of the play: the culmination of the poet and the playwright, language and vision, the internal and the expressed. McKenna explained that he first started PETTYCASH as a means to liberate spoken word from its older, more masculine origins and make it more relevant and diverse. In GRINDR, he has attempted this revolution in theatre. Indeed, there is something so refreshing about McKenna’s stage-verse. The satire has more bite, his almost impossible, break-neck delivery of enviously well-captured phrases adds a new dynamic to the monologue and introduces a much more internal and intimate way of characterization. This said, GRINDR is by no means perfect. The wonderful thing about spoken word is that it’s quick, it’s momentary, and it’s razor sharp. With a running time of roughly 60 minutes, the audience could feel the energy petering out towards the end. As Johnny’s love life begins to disconnect, the tempo is notably reduced; the crispness of the language subsides. It seems McKenna must go one step further to make this form truly work on the stage.
GRINDR’s subject matter is perhaps what really hits the audience. Every reference and its accompanying giggle reminds the audience of his or her participation in the joke. To be of this generation, in this time and place, is almost to be living within the play itself. The staging of the play through projection, screen cams, and powerpoints highlights the clash between public and private, and reminds the audience of the webs of reality and fiction surrounding us in an increasingly online world. The rendering of this theme into performance poetry and theatre only enhances the sense of disconnect, the subtle but omnipresent cavern between the self and the fictions we create.
GRINDR / a love story is running till Saturday at the Player’s Theatre in Trinity College with performances at 6.30pm and a matinee at 2pm on Saturday (tickets €13/€11 concession).
