One-woman play My Year Without Sex tells the story of one Winifred Tickletext, a newly widowed British tourist who has a series of adventures on her travels, where she invariably gives a bad name to British tourists everywhere. She meets many characters along the way, but repeatedly runs into Mandy, a vegan tourist with both the accent and insecurity of Sharon Strzelecki.
This is a very impressive performance from aussie-born actress Jessica Gerger (who is also the daughter of director Beverly Blankenship). She fills in well over a dozen roles over the course of the hour, helped along in her transformations by an extremely clever production piece that is variously a giant suitcase, a taxicab, a bus, a dinghy and a cottage. With the smallest of touches, this helped the audience visualize Mrs. Tickletext’s travels across Europe (Rome, Vienna, Berlin, and ultimately Jerusalem).
However, many fine pieces do not always make a coherent whole, and this was certainly the case here. Ten different authors were credited for writing the play, and you can certainly feel the discontinuity of these voices at times, as the entire play had a rambling, unfocused feel. This was undoubtedly intentional, but left one with the impression that you were watching a wild improvisation, with each idea trying to outdo the last in terms of outrageousness and unbelievablility. With the right comic momentum, this could have peaked brilliantly by the end of the show, but for some reason the audience, in spite of the odd chuckle, never got carried away with the character or the story. As a result the latter felt strangely themeless. There was some initial direction in the friendship between the two lead protagonists, but it was left abandoned in the extremely confusing finale- a feeling the audience may share.
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