Orlando Fringe 2022 review: ‘Bugged Lady’

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[Editor's note: We bring your attention to this 2022 review of the same show, after confirming with the artist that the show is essentially unchanged.]

Take an exploratory field trip away from the Fringe campus to nearby Harry P. Leu Botanical Gardens and you’ll find the most fascinating — and frightening — introductory biology class you’ll ever attend at Bugged Lady.

Professor Levi (Sandi Linn) is lecturing on invertebrates she has known and loved — as well as misogynistic academics she has hated and lost — in a truly one-of-a-kind performance that fuses the pleasures of Wild Kingdom with The Silence of the Lambs. As Levi gleefully gives the audience an intimate look at her collection of real live insects — including hissing cockroaches, stinging scorpions and hair-flinging tarantulas — she slowly lets slip the gory details of her bug-based homicides.

Linn, who wrote the script herself, is a trained scientist and education supervisor for Leu Gardens, so I’m sure you’re perfectly safe attending her class. But her increasingly agitated performance is so magnetically authentic — and her animal assistants so primally triggering — that you’d better arrive for class early and bring paper for taking notes ... just in case.