About This Show
Mono a Mono is an evening of back-to-back solo performances featuring Melissa Shaw and Emily Helfgot. The two brilliant performers take on their own psyches and American life in poignant, insightful and hilarious new monologues.
In On How to Dress Your Child the Day You are Going to Pretend That They Have Polio comedian/performance artist Melissa Shaw examines her prototypical American childhood – being kidnapped by her mother, secretly calling the Xmas tree the “Hanukkah bush,” and living in a motel across the street from Disneyland – in light of today’s reactionary, xenophobic, nationalistic political moment.
In Play/date, improviser/comedian Emily Helfgot confronts the mediocrity of real-life adulthood – particularly the drudgery of looking for one good date in New York City – asking herself why it’s not as fun as the grown-up roles she imagined for herself in her childhood games (distraught social worker, star of stage and screen, sea lion behaviorist, and best of all, proprietor of a wildly successful imaginary escort service).