Dockery is a longtime Orlando Fringe favorite, one of four traveling storytellers we profiled in last week's Fringe preview. His offering at this year's festival tells the story of his discovery that his very repressed father has, upon retiring, remarried and begun a new family. In Vietnam. Without telling anyone. In other words, Dockery has a brand-new set of siblings, and they're 36 years younger than he is — and half-Vietnamese. This discovery is interwoven with the dawning realization that his relationship is either dissolving or on the point of deepening; neither he nor his girlfriend is sure yet which it will be.
As Dockery expands in his utterly unique voice – by turns raspy, yelpy, growly; half-strangled at points – upon the "epic game of emotional chicken" his father is playing (and which Dockery and his girlfriend are also playing), we realize that the surprise of the sudden half-siblings is not the titular surprise. Rather, the ways people act, their essential unknowability, the unpredictable nature of love – that's the surprise. That's always the surprise.
Martin Dockery - Brooklyn, NY
Length: 60 minutes
Venue: Yellow
Price: $11 (+svc. charge)
Disc.: None
Rating: 7+ -
