Hollywood Fringe Festival Theatre Review: This Vicious Minute

This Vicious Minute

Written by Ben Moroski

75 minutes; $5 - $10

Synopsis: In his one man show, Ben Moroski – straight-A student, former quarterback of the high school football team – shares his struggle with cutting.

Initial Reaction: The production is so simple and the story so personal, it seems perfectly suited for the Fringe Fest.

Review: Vicious recounts Moroski's struggle with self-mutilation, as well as with love, sex, and his church. They all get wrapped up in each other, one feeding on another, cycling, expounding. While Moroski did not begin cutting until he was seventeen, he starts his story four years previously, as a new teenage boy, freshly "saved" on a religious retreat. He arrives at home eager to begin his life of personal purity void of lust, kissing, and masturbation.  He knew he could be good – righteous - if he could just be strong enough.

He wasn’t.

He quickly discovered that he could not ignore his sexual desires. He lusted, touched himself, and failed to protect his prescribed virtue. He could not control his urges. So, instead, he would cut. He had never heard of the act. It wasn't an event or condition with a name, therefore “it couldn’t be right or wrong,” he explains. It was his way of gaining control. Cutting was his friend, he admits. Fascinatingly, Moroski speaks about the surprisingly sexual nature of his relationship with self-harming. There is that same excitement: the trembling and foreplay as he gently runs the razor across his chest before making the first slice. There is even, he reveals, an erection. Cutting was also glamorously tragic. He would call up girlfriends, threatening to cut, letting them talk him out of it. He could test their relationship and love, as well as his worth. He was fucked up, but they might save him. He cut so they could.

While Moroski has gone through periods of sobriety, he tends to gloss over them in his piece. He presents them with so few details, they almost seem arbitrarily happenstance, months or years where he just didn't cut. He doesn’t describe them as if they were a struggle, part of cycle, or periods of hope. They actually seem like minor plot-points in his life he can’t seem to milk any storytelling value out of. Ignoring the significance of these periods has the unfortunate consequence of limiting the story; it does not become a tale of recovery. It’s a story of what cutting did for him, which could have been engrossing in its own right, but why, then, frame it as a narrative? The play carries us along, but ultimately doesn’t lead anywhere.

Vicious does end on a powerful note with the artist removing his shirt and taking inventory of his scars. Like rings in a tree, each scar marks moments, years, battles lost. In a soft voice he lists each weapon - X-Acto knife, curling iron, sewing needle – while pointing to each old wound. It’s a powerful display: a physical journal of suffering, rarely seen in live theater. One just wishes it received the introspection it deserved.

Best Line: “When I cut, I disappear.”

Bottom line: The play is highly personal, though it lacks the insight necessary to make it a true standout. It’s as much about his struggle with relationships and religion as it is about cutting. While Moroski uses those aspects of his life to explain the what?, he never gets quite deep enough to the why?, thus making his monologue feel incomplete. Moroski does deserve credit for avoiding self-pity and melodrama. The play is never indulgent, and I admire how the playwright is not concerned with making his motivations relatable or likable.

You can catch This Vicious Minute at the Elephant Theater: June 17th 12pm; June 18th 9pm; June 19th 10:30pm; June 24th 4pm.  Find tickets here.

Dan Johnson is a freelance writer in Los Angeles helping cover the 2012 Hollywood Fringe Festival for Cinesnatch.