Attention Seeker
The painfully shy joke-writer for a famous British comic crashes into the Standup spotlight… and the rest is history (except history is normally written by the winners). A regrettably true story about mental distraction & ego destruction.
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5:30 pm Attention Seeker
See https://theatreinlondon.ca/2018/05/attention-seeker/ for details.
Location: Spriet Family Theatre
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5:30 pm
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9:30 pm Attention Seeker
See https://theatreinlondon.ca/2018/05/attention-seeker/ for details.
Location: Spriet Family Theatre
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9:30 pm
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3:30 pm Attention Seeker
See https://theatreinlondon.ca/2018/05/attention-seeker/ for details.
Location: Spriet Family Theatre
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3:30 pm
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6:00 pm Attention Seeker
See https://theatreinlondon.ca/2018/05/attention-seeker/ for details.
Location: Spriet Family Theatre
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6:00 pm
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9:30 pm Attention Seeker
See https://theatreinlondon.ca/2018/05/attention-seeker/ for details.
Location: Spriet Family Theatre
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9:30 pm
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1:30 pm Attention Seeker
See https://theatreinlondon.ca/2018/05/attention-seeker/ for details.
Location: Spriet Family Theatre
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1:30 pm
Location: Spriet Family Theatre
He’s Worth Your Attention
Gerard Harris in “Attention Seeker” is a storyteller who tells jokes that aren’t funny. It’s all in the way he tells them. And that’s the key to the show. He’s connecting with you, the audience member. He’s not performing; he’s sharing his experience of performing stand-up for 1500 people in Ireland. He’s as scared as you would be. You feel his pain. You also cheer for him. He used to write for a now famous British comedian whom he doesn’t name (I’m guessing John Oliver? They have the same energy). Spoiler alert! That’s how he got the gig.
He enters the stage drinking a bottle of Corona. The bottle is half-gone. He has the kind of manic pace of talking that leaves you straining to hear every word. It’s as if his brain functions on a different frequency and he’s letting it run at full speed. The words pour out and they are coherent and mesmerizing.
I can’t imagine this man’s body or mind being still for a moment. Then he describes being on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. I know he would win a contest for talking, but being silent? Trust me, you’ll want to hear his thoughts on this experience.
Gerard fills the space with more entertaining stories than he has time for. The time runs out and the audience follows him out into the hall because, indeed, we don’t want to miss a word he says. He has our rapt attention.
If you like storytelling that is honest, real and self-deprecating with a splash of dry British humour, you’ll love Gerard’s show. Don’t miss it!
As an autobiographical confessional, Attention Seeker is less a narrative and more an experience in one man’s unique stream of consciousness. Storyteller Gerard Harris describes his early days as a comedy writer, struggles with stagefright and other experiences including meditative retreats, divorce and awkward interactions between zippers and genitals.
Harris rapidly ricochets between childhood memories of exasperating his teachers to adult memories of illegal immigration. Within two to three anecdotes, the speedy back-and-forth causes any sense of time and space to vanish; Attention Seeker becomes driven entirely by Harris’ riveting onstage presence.
As Harris dives about the stage, he babbles words with machine-gun intensity. He expresses motor-mouthed anxiety over his first attempts at stand-up comedy alongside earlier memories of selling jokes to others. A painful parting from his ex-wife sees him contort his body into a shambling shuffle of agony-stricken arms and legs. A meditative trance is performed with serene contentment that quickly becomes a limp paralysis.
With such relentless pacing and scattered structure, it’s sometimes hard to follow where or when Harris’ stories are taking place. Yet, this is to Attention Seeker’s advantage: Harris’ magnetic personality, hyper-expressive body language and commanding performance make him gripping. Very quickly, the lost details seem not only trivial but a needless distraction from tracking Harris’ emotional path.
The anecdotes become a platform for presenting Harris’ frantic thought process, eventually revealed as Harris’ cycle of finding confidence and competence only to lose it and search for it again, a process that seems to span his entire life both over decades and within minutes. When Harris tells a story of self-diagnosing his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, it’s presented as an offhand footnote rather than a grand revelation.
For someone who talks so much and so veryveryveryfast, Harris conveys tremendous vulnerability and a desperate longing to reach out. It suggests that Attention Seeker isn’t a character description. Instead, it’s a process for Harris to find some area on which to focus his frenzied mind.