In The Park
Opening Night: May 14, 2014
Closing: June 17, 2014
Theater: Axis Theatre
As Edgar Oliver wanders through Prospect Park he guides his audience to hidden landscapes few have seen but he also reveals his innermost longings and regrets. In this most personal of Edgar’s monologues, he maps his deepest memories of childhood and experience. In The Park is a journey of loss and hope, joy and sadness, along tangled paths to the fascinating place that is Edgar’s heart.
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May 14, 2014
“I think that I died as a child,” muses Edgar Oliver. “Some part of me stopped. But some part of me kept going. I keep on wandering.” As with his previous solo work, In the Park relies heavily on Oliver’s unsettling persona, marked by his inimitable diction, a lilting mélange of Savannah gentleman, queer epicurean, and Euro-ghoul. What makes this Walser-esque daisy chain of pastoral vignettes cohere is Oliver’s perverse enthusiasm: the genuine ecstasy he takes in forbidden or gruesome scenarios, and in glorifying his alienation not just from society, but from his own identity.
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May 14, 2014
Edgar Oliver has yellowed teeth, hooded eyes and a sagging jaw. If it weren’t for his gentle smile, you might mistake him for that portrait of Dorian Gray. A writer and performer, Mr. Oliver will put you in mind of the macabre. He has a tendency to turn even the most banal event — like drinking a Shirley Temple — into something out of Edgar Allan Poe. In the Park, his new monologue at Axis Theater, has Mr. Oliver strolling through Prospect Park in Brooklyn. These meanderings often lead him back to the boy he was and to the young men he loved. Many of these recollections have a mournful tinge. Even as a child, Mr. Oliver says, “I realized that I loved sorrow, and that I loved melancholy, and that I loved life.”
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