Jeff Onore is one weird dude. His one-man show So What About Jeff is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. I like twisted. I like dark. But his mind is twisted and dark in ways that I can’t comprehend. His delivery is flat and measured, so that it takes a moment to process what you hear. Did he really just say he slept with a monkey? Is it even possible to have feelings for a robotic baby? Crayons as a snack? Please, no! This show is an excellent reminder to never judge a book by its cover. The guy across from you may look like a boring businessman, but for all you know, he’s conjuring up images of monkey love and robotic baby butts.
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Correction: In the initial blog post of this review, we mistakenly called the show What About Jeff?. The proper title is What What Happened to Jeff?. The Coast regrets the error.
This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2009.
This show is actually titled “What Happened to Jeff,” and it was the best show I saw at the Atlantic Fringe. It was very well-written and so well performed that it’s a shame that so few people were able to catch it at the wildly unsuccessful Living Room theatre venue. The dark and twisted moments of the play were perfectly punctuated with tender, human moments.
Hmm, pretty lazy “review”. No, I don’t believe he said he slept with the monkey, nor did he have any interest in baby butts. He started off, as you say, apparently straightforward; a guy in a suit talking about going to court for his divorce (though the humor came almost immediately). But he used detail so effectively that it obscured the line between normality and those startling, funny, poignant fictions. I laughed like crazy and found it very moving. Don’t know what to compare this guy to, I haven’t seen anything like it.