[NoHo Arts District, CA] – A NoHo Arts theatre review of Title Pending, written and performed by Heather Tyson at Whitefire Theatre’s Solofest 2024.
How to create the perfect solo show.
A. Make it about something important to you.
B. Work on it until it flows and whirs and purrs exquisitely.
C. Magically mix it all together with pathos, subplot and humor and let it slowly build to its natural impactful crescendo.
D. Be brilliant, heartbreaking, moving and nuanced in your delivery.
E. Make sure your name is Heather Tyson…
Simple!
Heather Tyson is a truly remarkable storyteller. In this opus of a solo show, Title Pending, she explores a pivotal, epiphanic moment of her life with extraordinary skill and nuance. Heather’s play had a hugely successful sold-out run at the 2023 Hollywood Fringe Festival. She was an Official Selection of the 2023 Binge Fringe Festival, as well as an Official Selection of the prestigious 2024 Whitefire Theatre’s Solofest. So I’m not the only one who thought it was wonderful.
It’s a strange thing really, to be so thrilled with a show that’s about a very painful moment in another person’s life. But art is often about pain and great art is often about great pain. Taking an event that breaks you and turning that scar into something beautiful is quite a feat. But Heather Tyson has managed it brilliantly.
Her hilarious, relentlessly funny and heartbreaking story is so skillfully wrought, set against her job as an auto sales trainer, each beat of her unfolding disaster paralleled by a comical yet exquisitely relevant feature of the actual sales training.
The audience is her student, imagining her falling apart as she highlights another vitally important factor in their customer training. It’s an utterly brilliant dramatic device. And the cleverness of every revelation unfurled, every emotional breakdown stifled by her work agenda is a deeply effective and wonderfully evocative way to share her journey. She is also a very fine actor, she holds the audience in the palm of her bravely trembling hand. And we feel her pain. Completely. I absolutely loved Title Pending. Even though the name of the show is dripping in sarcasm, it really does beautifully communicate the honestly of an unfinished life. A state of mind and being that has yet to be fully understood and is therefore unnamable. How brilliant.
I hope to have the opportunity to see this show again and I hope you have the same opportunity to spend an hour or so in the company of this extraordinary performer and herTitle Pending.