Joanna Parson (Photo by Bill Wadman)
Reviewed by F. Kathleen Foley
A Hollywood Fringe show at The Broadwater (Black Box)
Closed
Actor/Singer/Songwriter Joanna Parson is a congenial individual, and her solo show, A Transcriber’s Tale, is diverting entertainment. However, her autobiographical narrative, which treats her tenure as a transcriber in Manhattan during the ‘90s and early 2000s — a job that took a grim turn after 9/11 — never quite transitions from personal reminiscence to wider significance.
After moving to New York from a small town in Connecticut, Parson immediately falls in love with the city, where she spends the next decade-plus pursuing her acting career. During that uphill process, she hones her skills at various small clubs performing her own comedy act, complete with satirical songs. A modestly talented vocalist and guitarist, she incorporates her original music into this hour-long piece
Parson meets her long-time boyfriend on the club scene, but traumatized in the aftermath of 9/11, he decamps for a more peaceful life in Minneapolis. Committed to the city and her career, she declines to accompany him, instead taking a break from her regular transcription company to work for a television celebrity — transcribing his interviews for a how-to book about how various prominent individuals succeeded in their fields. Inspired by those stories, she quits her regular job, confronting her boss in a fiery (and unmotivated) display. (She admits, retrospectively, that she was acting like an “a**hole.”)
In Aimee Todoroff’s unobtrusive staging, Parson can charm, but her material, which she has been honing since 2012, has considerable holes in logic and structure. It’s sweet that she prides herself on being “a link in the information chain,” but she never adequately explains the exact process of talk-to-text transcription — that is, where the tapes she transcribed actually came from and for whom they were intended. Also, the central event of 9/11 is a long time coming and drops into the action belatedly. A shake-up in the step-by-step chronology could lend more dramatic interest to the earlier scenes.
Still, although it could use another polish, Parson’s short and agreeable divertissement takes us behind the scenes of a little understood profession with all its challenges — and traumas.
