Delirium

by Martin Dockery, Brooklyn, NY

Review by Kate Klein

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The show begins before the show at Martin Dockery’s solo piece Delirium. Or maybe it’s not a show at all but one unified outpouring of highly engaged storytelling and personal connection: Five minutes before curtain time, Dockery, who’s making his Ithaca Fringe debut this week, has introduced himself to every member of the audience.

 

Meet Martin Dockery, a versatile Brooklyn-based theater artist whose show of storytelling, Delirium, officially begins with the spin of a finger. Tracing a circle around the crown of his head, he transports us to a new place: “Right now, right here in this moment, I’m standing in the Toronto airport, feeling insignificant and vulnerable . . .”

 

And we’re off. Through a fast-paced patter of vivid language, energetic physicality, and emotional honesty, Dockery relates a three-chapter true story about his journey through life, love, and loss, amplifying his own experiences into hilarious, profound points of connection.

 

The words do not stop—and neither do the laughs. He is a master of turning his every day experiences into beautiful, colorful episodes.

 

He tells us about the day he lost track of his beloved in the Toronto airport. He tells us about serving a strawberry sandwich to a stranger at Burning Man. He tells us about tangling with the law on a pilgrimage to Mexico, to the winter home of Monarch butterflies.

 

Dockery’s physical presence says as much as his words. He reaches, he crouches, he minces, he runs. He rakes his hands through his hair. He embodies each character in his tales. His hands become co-stars as they orbit his body. He uses every bit of the stage at the Community School of Music and Arts—and often some of the audience’s space, too.

 

The physicality and the words add up to deep emotional resonance. At points he dialogues with audience members, riffing on conversations started before the show. He’s aware of our attention at every point. He shares widely varied emotions: joy, fear, anger, embarrassment, tenderness. And most significantly, his own openness about his experiences and his deeply-felt questions about human life in a seemly indifferent universe reach into our experiences, open us up, and make us think and feel along, even as we’re laughing.

 

Delirium is not stand-up comedy, Dockery claimed vehemently at the Ithaca Fringe opening party—and it’s not. Dockery is so much more than a stand-up comic, although Delirium delivers as many laughs per minute as the best comics; he’s a master storyteller who teases out a thread from the chaos of his own experiences—some mundane, some exotic—and his own bravely raw emotions to connect on a hilarious and profound level with his audience. And he’s aware of and reacting to the other humans in the room in every sentence of the way.