by ⭐⭐⭐⭐
“If it’s not content, then why did it happen?”
That’s a pithy way for someone who has grown up in the social media age to describe their terrible case of TMI. But McCafferty’s own show description for the Fringe calls her hour a dark comedy “about death, dating and diarrhea.” So, yes, quite pithy indeed.
McCafferty’s podcast series is titled “Pretty Gay,” but she prefers onstage to call herself queer, because she jokes it’s as ambiguous as tuna casserole. “Why is this hot?” you might wonder, equally, about these two disparate things. You might brace yourself for plenty of spoilers at the top of her hour if you look too closely at the pages strung about in a line behind her. But that won’t prepare you for the otherwise good songs you’ll hear that McCafferty has somehow connected to the most inappropriate moments in her life. And befitting a Fringe show in this day and age, she will share a dead dad story or two, as well as SA stories that should and do come with trigger warnings.
And yet, you’ll realize as she eventually does that calling her storytelling show “(Not) That Bad” is not so much a way to sete herself apart from some of the other harrowing performance pieces at the Fringe, but also, and perhaps more significantly, her attempt at minimizing and rationalizing her own trauma. And that’s not as helpful to her mental health as she might’ve thought.
Turning the page(s), in the quite literal sense, allows her to see her story for how it has truly unfolded, whether we saw it that way from the get-go or not.
Her self-effacing charm may win us over as she dives into the deepest parts of her past, but as she gains self-confidence from this assured debut hour, everything else ahead of her truly won’t be so bad.
