2025 Audience Reviews

Company: Joking Apart Theater
Show: The Jaws That Bite, The Claws That Catch!
Venue: Theatre in the Round

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

Edwin Strout has created an electric piece of performance art. With the handsome looks of Claude Rains and a sly wit that is all his own, his performance is even more astounding when knowing that he also wrote the script. Spearheading Joking Apart Theater’s Fringe show, "The Jaws That Bite, the Claws That Catch!," he shepherds us through a man’s mind as he uses Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical "Jabberwocky" poem to make sense of his own nonsensical mind. The audience quickly follows him, like Alice following the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole, moving swiftly through densely packed text, as we come to realize that he is not only dissecting the poem, like Humpty Dumpty in "Through the Looking-Glass," but he is also unravelling the missed steps, the unfortunate and passed over opportunities, of his personal life. How long has he been inside this loop of self-discovery, therapy, and psychoanalysis only to trip over his own words, wounds, and painful memories, again and again? Perhaps he is holding up a looking-glass. How long have we all been inside that same loop? Fully supported on stage by the transformative David Denninger and Anna Olson, this production allows its audience to take a big bite, even enough for the Jabberwocky to chew on for a while.