PRETTY GOOD, NOT BAD to Play The Tank This Week Before Heading to Edinburgh Festival

Pretty Good, Not Bad written by and starring Ellen Toland and directed by Rachel McBath, is going to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with previews at The Tank in NYC on August 6th and 7th. The show explores fawning, victimhood and the societal expectations surrounding it, narrative control, and self-exploitation for personal gain.

Synopsis: Walking home, Ellen finds herself face-to-face with a ski-masked man. Her reaction is to smile and say, “Hi!” He attacks her. She survives. One year later, Ellen hasn't booked since. When she's called to audition for a LAW & ORDER: SVU-like procedural, she takes matters into her own hands to get what's hers. This solo show written by Ellen Toland and directed by Rachel McBath is about how to play a perfect victim.

Says Ellen Toland, “if you've been subjected to violence, you try to find control in shaping the narrative of your experience and struggle to maintain that narrative control. Sometimes people try to influence or insert themselves in your experience. Sometimes your own memory tricks you into altering what happened in your narrative. And sometimes your narrative controls you.”

Set in an audition for an Law & Order SVU-adjacent procedural, Pretty Good, Not Bad considers the potentially gray ethics required in selling our “authentic” selves to get something we want. The show also explores the comfort we take in watching someone go through traumatic violence for our entertainment. It also explores how, as Toland says, “as artists we co-opt our own stories, especially now, to stand out.”

We hear about “fight or flight” as a binary response to threats, but the conversation often excludes the phenomena of “fawn or freeze”. ‘Fawn' is particularly complicated, because it is the attempt to control the outcome of a situation by making someone feel comfortable, often by making yourself appear less than, non threatening, or vulnerable. 

This show brings more nuance to some of this conversation around true crime with Ellen telling her story by employing the structure and references to the the most-watched procedural, which is of course the show following narratives of sexual assault and violence. 

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