Review of The Neo-Futurists' Mike Mother

Once upon a time I went to a show and it was called Mike Mother. It was created and written by Jessica Anne, and it was directed by Josh Matthews. It was about this girl named Jessica Anne and she had not had a very good childhood and teenage years. It was about her story and the way that she's dealt with her hard life. Mike (Mike Hamilton) is a very good friend to her and in the show they seem to have fun together and he helps her with the show. This show is about parenting, deceit, and making experience into art. I think Jessica Anne made this show to let out her anger and tell her story to people who come to listen. But I don't think what she is doing is selfish; I think it is very powerful and brave for her to share her intriguing and distressing story. I think it is good to see what someone else's life is like and she gives that opportunity to us.

The beginning of the show was much more happy than the rest of the show was. They started out with a bunch of recorded applause and were telling jokes. I think that kind of tricked me, but in a good way, because it led me to believe that the mother-daughter relationship would be a lot better than it actually was. So my experience was kind of like Jessica's experience with her mom. She thought something about her mom that wasn't true. There was a good contrast in this show between goofiness and Jessica's terrible real life experiences. Instead of having just one emotion throughout the show, you feel a lot of different emotions and the contrasts gives each emotion a lot more impact and they hit you harder.

I thought that the water ballet was the most light-hearted part of the show because it showed that when she was a little kid she was not completely destroyed by what her mom has done yet. Mike and Jessica are spitting out water into this tub and there is music playing and it is supposed to represent when she would have fun with other kids by putting on water ballets where they would dance on garbage bags on their tiptoes. It kind of seemed like the water ballet she remembered was kind of like her first performance. She used water, she danced around with her friend, and she turned garbage bags into a stage and tried to make her life which she thinks is kind of like garbage into art. You find out something later about this memory that helps you understand that even if something isn't true it can still tell you the truth.

There was this part where they tossed coins in a tub whenever they quoted 'night, Mother, which is a show about a woman and her mom and the woman is going to kill herself. That is a very depressing show and so is this one. Sometimes they reenact scenes from 'night Mother with lamb puppets, which I found very disturbing. The rest of the audience seemed to think it was hilarious, but the over-exaggeration to make suicide and seizures funny things to me felt very disturbing. I do like dark humor, but because Mike Mother was an actual story of someone and how they felt unloved, that made it more depressing than funny to me. I still really liked the show, but I just experienced it differently than some of the other audience members. I found other parts funny, like the water ballet because they were spitting out water and kind of being joyful and it didn't seem mean or inconsiderate to laugh about that.

People who would like this show are people who like emotional stories, water ballets, and lamb puppets. I think people should definitely go see this show. I thought it was really upsetting but it was important to me to see it because it is a real life story and it really made me feel a lot of emotions like anger, sympathy, and depression, but it was still very entertaining. I really liked this show and I think it was a really powerful story.

Photos: Joe Mazza @ Brave Lux