TOO FAT FOR CHINA Comes to Lost Nation Theater in April

Phoebe Potts wants a tiny little baby and she's stopping at nothing to get one! In Too Fat For China, Phoebe tells her own life story in an hilarious, award-winning solo, taking a comic look on the agony of adoption. It’s onstage at Lost Nation Theater for one week only – Wednesday-Sunday, April 9-13.

 Her story is a testimony that chronicles the long, circuitous, journey to adopt her child, one that involves sea turtles, capitalism, and Zoloft. It’s hard to imagine how that all comes together – but it does; in a show that will have you crying with laughter and laughing through your tears!

Too Fat For China follows Phoebe Potts, comic storyteller and self-described professional Jew, as she tries, fails, and eventually succeeds to adopt a baby.

After a US adoption goes horribly wrong, Potts finds herself surprised, disgusted and ultimately resigned to the role she plays as a middle-class white-lady in the business of adopting babies. Potts’ tragicomic journey is about looking for more: more love, more life, and more family, and she’ll do anything to get it – including having her morals and values fold in on themselves. She admits it: she did terrible things for love. And she’d do them again! 

Potts comes to the stage armed with a larger-than-life Cranky (“think of a 6-foot Torah Scroll on its side”, she says), displaying her own comic strip drawings of the “newsreel” in her head – the one that keeps track of everyone she’s been disappointing lately, the slights made against her – and her overall story.

Her story begins in Brooklyn. As Potts tells it: “Not the lavender infused bespoke headcheese pleasure-dome that it is today, but the dirty, murdery, pee-soaked Brooklyn of the 1970’s.” She explains, “Brooklyn was a Jewish town then. The cops were Jewish, the teachers were Jewish, the lawyers, the Irish, the Blacks, the Puerto Ricans - everyone was Jewish." 

And Brooklyn was also where everyone was indignant before breakfast. Potts learned to tell stories to get her family to like her and to understand thorny issues.

LNT believes a good story can help sustain us and bring us together in challenging times, and that’s why founding artistic director Kim Bent is so excited to share this remarkable show with Vermont.

“In Too Fat For China, Phoebe – a consummate performer, is following in the tradition of Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg, and Eric Bogosian. It’s a wonderful form of theater/storytelling/stand-up comedy – a combination of performance and yarn-spinning, Her visual creations add such an hilariously entertaining aspect to her storytelling.”

 At LNT, Phoebe’s work is further enhanced with set-design from Kim Bent, lighting design by Charlotte Seelig, and stage management from Tara Hightower.  Producing Artistic Director Kathleen Keenan says “the immediacy of LNT’s space – with its close actor-audience relationship, allows you to experience this exhilarating show in the best way possible. Phoebe’s talking right to you – there is no 4th wall. And here at LNT, it’ll feel like theater in your living room!”

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