Review: THE ONE at The Boiler Room

To start her new solo show, THE ONE, Andrea Parson walks on stage in a white dress and veil, bouquet in hand, as if she’s walking down the aisle. She realizes she can’t go through with it, tries to escape, trips, and asks an audience member for help. It’s an ingenious opening that immediately gets the entire room on her side before she dives into her quest to find "the one," or even just to figure out what the heck that even means and how she'll know if she's ready for it. Do you really have to love yourself before you can love someone else?

Parson started out as a dancer before moving into multidisciplinary theatre, and she's also quite a comedian. For THE ONE, she enlisted director Jessica Wallenfels, whose own work centers on movement-forward theatremaking. The result is a piece where movement and storytelling aren't separate elements but a single instinct.

That full-body storytelling is put to work as Parson wades through a quagmire of confusing parental advice, impossible societal expectations, and tales of religious fervor, all while trying to reconcile the fairy tale of one true love with the reality of the dating scene. The dance becomes a physical readout of her inner state as she processes the gap between everything she's been told about love and what she's actually experiencing. Sometimes her body looks like it's fighting with itself. Other times, everything is perfectly in sync.

The opening bit also sets up the audience interaction that runs through the entire piece. Parson is playful with the audience, drawing people into the journey rather than letting them simply watch from a distance, which makes sense for a show about a desire, and a pressure, so many people share. The good news is that even as she’s tackling one of life’s biggest anxieties, it’s all done with a wink and a nod. Parson moves confidently between vulnerability and comedy, and she has a gift for turning on a dime: just as a confessional moment threatens to tip into sentimentality, she'll land a perfectly timed joke and pull the whole room back with her.

With THE ONE, Parson has built a show that turns a very personal search into something the whole room shares in, whether or not you’ve ever stood at the altar of your own expectations about finding the one.

The run I saw was just for the weekend, but keep your eyes peeled for future dates as well as anything else Parson does. You can follow her work here.

Photo credit: @jingziphotography