World Premiere of Phoebe Potts' TOO FAT FOR CHINA Is Coming to Watertown's Mosesian Center for the Arts
TOO FAT FOR CHINA follows Phoebe Potts, comic, storyteller, and professional Jew, as she tries, fails, and eventually succeeds in adopting a baby.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Apr. 25, 2022
Live Arts Boston, in conjunction with Gloucester Stage Company, will present TOO FAT FOR CHINA, a world premiere one-woman show written and performed by Phoebe Potts, at Watertown's Mosesian Center for the Arts, located at 321 Arsenal Street, Watertown, MA, before heading to Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
TOO FAT FOR CHINA follows Phoebe Potts, comic, storyteller, and professional Jew, as she tries, fails, and eventually succeeds in adopting a baby. After a US adoption goes horribly wrong, Potts finds herself surprised, disgusted, and ultimately resigned to her role as a middle-class white lady in the business of adopting babies in the US and internationally. Potts' tragicomic journey is about looking for more, more love, more life, and more family and will do anything to get it, including having her morals and values fold in on themselves.
A native of Brooklyn, where everyone was indignant before breakfast, Potts learned to tell stories to get her family to like her and understand thorny issues. In TOO FAT FOR CHINA, Potts uses humor and honesty to tell the irreverent story of the terrible things she did for love. She comes to the stage armed with her drawing sketchbook and a team of two-dimensional characters direct from the newsroom in her head.
Coming from sold-out workshop performances at Gloucester Stage on National Adoption Day in 2019, this world-premiere is made possible in part by a Live Arts Boston (LAB) grant from The Boston Foundation. This comedic theater performance is a sequel to Potts' graphic memoir, Good Eggs (Harper, 2010), which charts her travails with infertility and the endless rounds of treatments and miscarriages she and her husband endured. Roz Chast, the New Yorker cartoonist, called Potts' memoir "sometimes funny, sometimes sad, but always honest, intelligent, and completely involving."
Potts' day job is teaching and learning Torah with children and adults through "Visual Midrash." Potts designed this class to help students from families who identify as Jewish find a connection to the ancient texts for themselves by asking lots of questions and making art about the answers. Potts lives with her family in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
TOO FAT FOR CHINA has been accepted into the prestigious 2022 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The world's largest arts festival, which completely consumes the historic Scotland town during August, puts Potts on the international center stage. Edinburgh Fringe has been the proving ground for countless performers, including Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag, Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, and even the Broadway hit musical SIX by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss.
TICKETS ON SALE NOW
Performance Times and Locations:
TOO FAT FOR CHINA
Friday April 29, 2022 @ 8:00pm
Saturday April 30, 2022 @ 3:00pm and 8:00pm
Mosesian Center for the Arts
321 Arsenal Street, Watertown, MA 02472
Tickets: $34, including all fees
Student Rush tickets are available 1 hour before each performance.
MCA Members receive a $2 discount on tickets.
To reserve tickets at the Mosesian Center for the Arts:
https://www.mosesianarts.org/shows
Box Office Phone: 617-923-0100
-
TOO FAT FOR CHINA at EDINBURGH FRINGE FESTIVAL
August 5 through August 22, 2022
Performances daily @ 6:30pm
Greenside @ Infirmary Street
6 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh, UK
For additional information, visit TOOFATFORCHINA.COM
ABOUT GLOUCESTER STAGE COMPANY:
Gloucester Stage Company is Boston's North Shore premier professional nonprofit theater company. Presenting professional productions of intellectually stimulating and socially relevant theater since its inception, Gloucester Stage has developed a highly engaged audience eager to experience the power of live theater. (gloucesterstage.com)
Comments
Videos