Meatball Séance: boyfriends, bread crumbs and Stevie Nicks
9 Jul 2022

by Drew Rowsome - photos supplied by John Michael

The closest metaphor or analogy that I can think of for the experience of Meatball Séance, is that moment when a potential new paramour is finally in your bed. Just as you're about to get to it, he begins to talk. And you realize that while this sexy soul may be naked, he has brought a lot of baggage between the sheets. It is then a matter of quickly weighing the pros and cons. He is very attractive, entertaining, funny, loves his mother, and promises great sex. But he also appears to be more than a little unhinged. And loves his mother.

Fortunately Meatball Séance turns out to be worth the risk. The sex is great.

Sex is more than a metaphor throughout Meatball Séance. Creator and performer John Micheal even compares the structure, explicitly, as building to when we will "cum." But it will be when he tells us to. Not that Michael is bossy or dom . . . That is just one facet of his overabundant personality. He is also exuberant, hilarious, and occasionally downright mean. The changes are quicksilver and and manic, but in a very endearing way. And when he is clad in only an apron and a pair of silver skimpy Andrew Christians, he is vulnerable and in the most brazenly fetching way possible.

Michael, and the Fringe Festival, have invited us to help him conduct a séance in order to bring his mother back from the grave in order for her to meet his new boyfriend. The séance does not involve the linking of hands around a table by candlelight, but rather by cooking his mother's famous meatballs. She cannot resist the smell of her meatballs, even from beyond the veil. There are actually several boyfriends, plucked from the audience and given assignments from chopping and frying to assuaging Michael's ego. Other audience members get to play Michael at various stages in his childhood and youth while Michael channels his mother. A more complicated portrait of his mother emerges: she is not the saint that Michael insists she is. And as his mother was apparently a Fleetwood Mac fan, particularly the Stevie Nicks-centric songs which get played for dramatic effect, it is easy to understand from where he inherited his melodramatic tendencies.

 
It is all very fast, furious and fragrant, with enough whiplash twists to keep the laughter flowing. Michael is working out the trauma of his mother's absence. Hence the references to being a trauma clown. And a true clown is what Michael is. Wearing his heart, and his erogenous zones, on his sleeve. Willing to do anything for a laugh, to display his raw flaws and foibles, in search of a universal truth. What he comes up with is a variation on his mother's wisdom, "For something to hold everything together, it must first be torn apart." She is referring to bread becoming bread crumbs becoming a binding agent, but Michael takes her advice literally and tears himself apart on stage before pulling it, and the audience, together.

 
Meatball Séance will vary from show to show depending on the enthusiasm level of the boyfriends. Being someone who dreads audience participation and finds it often a cheap gimmick, I was more than startled to find myself happily and intensely involved. As Michael warns us, after exhorting us repeatedly to get with the program and make some noise, "If you're scared of audience participation remember, you're going to die." And if you do die, I have no doubts that Michael will bring you back for one more memorable, edible snog.