Toronto Fringe Review: Veteran storyteller Jon Bennett transforms pandemic chaos, family awkwardness, and one unforgettable airport ordeal into an irresistibly human hour of comedy.
By Ross
One of the wildest parts of the Toronto Fringe Festival is never quite knowing what kind of storyteller will be waiting behind the next theatre door. Every performance arrives with its own voice, rhythm, and personality. Arriving once again at Soulpepper’s Garland Cabaret for Jon Bennett: American’t, I thought I was simply settling in for another solo show. Instead, Bennett casually wandered onstage, started talking, and before I even realized the performance had begun, he had the entire audience completely in the palm of his hand.
Bennett has been touring the world for years with brilliantly titled solo shows like Pretending Things Are A Cock, Fire in the Meth Lab, and Playing With Men, and that wonderfully fearless storytelling style is fully intact here. Bennett possesses that rare gift of making outrageous stories feel completely natural. Absolutely nothing seems off limits as he recounts being stranded in America during the pandemic, returning to rural Australia to live once again with his conservative family, and eventually finding himself detained while attempting to re-enter the United States. His stories bounce effortlessly between diabolically crude humour, awkward family encounters, existential doubt, and genuine emotional honesty. One minute he’s talking about exploding condoms filled with bodily fluids. The next, Bennett is confronting the unsettling reality that many people consider performers as “non-essential,” leaving him questioning not only his career but his purpose in the world.
What makes Jon Bennett: American’t so wildly compelling is Bennett’s willingness to stay completely vulnerable beneath the comedy. His storytelling occasionally wanders down unexpected detours, but his infectious charisma never allows the audience to drift away. Whether describing his father’s wonderfully deadpan declaration that he simply doesn’t like jokes or reliving the anxiety of a nine-hour airport interrogation, Bennett keeps revealing a man trying to laugh his way through questions he clearly still hasn’t answered in a world that suddenly feels unfamiliar. Every laugh opens the door to something unexpectedly personal, and we can’t help but stay with him to the end.
By the time Bennett takes his final bow, he has somehow turned airport interrogations, pandemic isolation, impossible family dinners, and one spectacularly strange life into something that feels weirdly universal. You spend an hour laughing at stories that sound too ridiculous to be true, only to realize Jon Bennett: American’t has quietly been asking the same question all along: where, exactly, do any of us belong?
