In the context of rational madness: THE BOOK OF LOCO


How do you tell a life in 90 minutes?

How do you give the audience enough context to tell even one story from a life in the same amount of time?

The Book of Loco is a semi-autobiographical monologue by Alirio Zavarce, covering what he terms “rational madness” – bizarre things some of us accept because we don’t (or can’t) know any better. It’s all about context.

In the context of Zavarce’s “book of loco”, a notebook he carries around to keep track of the stories of his life, we get to know him quite well. Depending on how semi this autobiographical show is.

Did he really get pulled over by customs officials over a reinforced suitcase? Did he really get interrogated on another return trip over the “convenient excuse” of his mother’s cancer? Did his marriage really collapse on September 11, 2001?

The Book of Loco is theatre, of course. It’s a performance. And it’s very theatrical. The set is a large stack of boxes. But inside those boxes are the stories of a life. Some of the stories are whimsical. Some of them are terrifying. Some are just awful.

But Zavarce and his director, Sasha Zahra, keep things moving – and keep the audience on edge by having Zavarce interact from even before the lights go down. Even that is a trick. The lights go up on the audience several times during the show. The line between performance and real life is thin. Just as the line between rationality and madness can be.

The show isn’t just about one life, though. It’s about stories and the context we hear them in. So in a show that also touches on terrorism and plane crashes, this show had a whole new context on Friday night – after having listened to the news all day about flight MH17 being blown up over Ukraine. We all come to theatre with our own life stories to inform us. But sometimes we come in with the same story in the front of our minds.

The Book of Loco, after the events of last week, was both upsetting and exhilarating. In any context.


The Book of Loco plays at the Malthouse Theatre until August 2.

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