The Man I Cure

If the lingering stink of TCP, the smooth crooning of Sinatra, and the tepid milk and congealed macaroni cheese handed to you by two apparently neurotic nurses as you enter the theatre isn’t enough to befuddle your senses and bewilder your mind, the rest of this show surely is.

This modern folktale, set somewhere in the first half of the twentieth century, begins with a soldier climbing through a window into what appears to be a hospital ward. As he regales the attendant nurses with stories of magic sacks and battles with Death, his state of mind becomes unclear, as does the line between reality, imagination and hallucination.

Meanwhile the sanity of the nurses is equally questionable, as they subject their new patient to the outworkings of their evident sexual repression, and attempt to heal his injuries—real or imagined—with yet more milk. To add to the general frenetic nature of this production, spoken word is interspersed with song, bird noises, and even at one point with a fairly lengthy dance routine.

Despite lacking the conventional hooks of a narrative that actually makes sense, the production, remarkably, is enthralling. This original, funny and just plain surreal show has won the team an Annie Garett Emerging Company Award. But their's is an adventurous, upside-down world, and not one for those who like beginnings, middles and ends.