From press release:

Jem attacked the silence because it sounded wimpy and like it wouldn’t fight back. He was wrong.  Watch Jem as he is chased down a very long dark alley by the ghost, the thousand tearing giant ants, and the hammer-wielding sprint-champion minotaur, of The Silence.

Pieces include:

• Is it just me or is the whole world speeding up?
• A very drippy love poem… “Is that a question-mark and its own reflection, or is that a heart?”…a series of lines so gooey even a Valentine’s card dissolved into pink mush.
• Which then dissolved into a pink goo.
• A poetic response to the billion words of Wikileaks… giving away in just three letters the greatest source of Global terrorism since 1947.
• A first foray into Jem’s childhood… a piece he thought would be two comic poems… but turned out to not be funny at all, or normal, when one got very big and turned into My Schoolmates Were The Children Of Future Mass Murderers.
• The world’s first ever Backstage Poem, or not. A wholly new kind of fiasco where the words soon get ideas of their own … “It’s like the Lord Of The Flies in there and I’m hiding in the jungle from me own poem.”
• A vigorous dig into the ghastlier realms of Jem’s psyche: Hold Still Jem, I’m Coming In.

This is Jem Rolls’ ninth Toronto Fringe since 2001. He has an unparalleled reputation for highly original, high-energy performance poetry shows, and great press.

References this year include: Balzac, Shakespeare, Mamet, Boney M, Odyssey, Batman, East Asian karaoke, Orwell, Sinclair Lewis, Justin Trudeau, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Malaysian t-shirts, Jonathan Richman.

An updated old favourite. A series of new insults to The British and, riskily, The Canadians.

Watch Jem machine-gun a maple-leaf shape in the stage and abruptly disappear through it.

• “New Britain, method in its madness, madness in its method/ New Canada, method in its method…”
• “New Canada you’ve borrowed two languages/ you’ve broken them both / and now you’re refusing to give them back…”
• Asking why Canadians smile so much?… something has to explain it… is it perhaps the dark years in the toy-torturing dolly-dumping teddy-shredding Canadian Smiling Gym?
• And where Jem might dig a big thanks to Canada from the depths of himself.

This year’s show was first put first together on Ai Banda in the middle of the Banda Sea, waiting days for the next boat out.

George Ignatieff Theatre

Thurs 4^th 6:30pm
Sun 7^th 8:15
Mon 8^th 1:00pm
Weds 10^th7.30
Thurs 11^th 4pm
Fri 12^th, 12pm
Sat 13^th, 6.15 pm