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Culture Stage

Fringe Review: “Ze” Queer As Fuck!

“ZE”: QUEER AS FUCK! by Michelle Lunicke. Tarragon Solo Room. July 2 at 1:30 pm, July 3 at 8 pm, July 4 at 5:45 pm, July 5 at 5 pm, July 6 at 10 pm, July 8 at 3:30 pm, July 9 at 9:45 pm. Buy tickets. Rating: NNN

Leaving the theatre after Wednesday’s show, a man congratulated writer/performer Michelle Lunicke: “That was a great way to start the week.” Or perhaps he said, “That was a great way to start the weekend.” Because it would be an equally accurate statement whether he was referring to the Fringe Festival or Pride.

Lunicke’s autobiographical monologue concerns the series of epiphanies on zir path to realizing and embracing a genderqueer identity. (“Ze” and “zir” are zir pronouns of choice.) But while the play begins with very entertaining audience-participation segments that bring new insights and comedy to well-trod subjects such as the Kinsey scale, the show quickly adopts a more conventional approach that renders the material compelling but seldom surprising.

Impressively, however, Lunicke has the courage to draw comparisons between the close-mindedness of the Evangelical environment in which ze grew up and the successive lesbian communities that rejected zir as ze unlocked each new element of zir identity.

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