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How many of you city dwellers have fantasized about moving to the country? With that challenge to the audience, Lauren Letellier launches her first-person, truthful account of just such an uprooting. The Village Cidiot – a term apparently used by rural lifers to describe new neighbors transplanted from the city – is Letellier’s solo show, now playing at one of the more apropos venues for it: New York City Fringe.
My answer to her question was yes, I have definitely imagined making such a move. But if you’re an over-stressed urbanite, this monologue might make you think seriously about staying put.
A Village Cidiot
Letellier and her husband were among the privileged. They owned a Manhattan apartment and a house in a small upstate New York village. But career setbacks forced them to sell the apartment and relocate full-time to their country getaway. Letellier vividly recounts the shock to her system of rural life and her fitful efforts to acclimate and find ways to belong.
Apparently she’s still trying, after seven years, to escape from what she calls her Bardo – a liminal space between being and becoming. Her account is often laugh-out-loud funny. It also rings true for those of us city natives who have experienced a little of rural life.
Letellier conjures interests to enliven her involuntary retirement and relieve her isolation: the local library, neglected historic cemeteries. She learns many lessons: about her husband, about living with a backyard bear, about neighborliness, about minding her own business. She and director Martha Wollner dot the show with comic bits to go with the wry observations and self-deprecating realizations.
No Time Left for You
Her devastating account of a death in the family at first seems unrelated to the thrust of the show. But ultimately it ties in, for, amid the grieving, it prompts a reflection on how we think we have time enough ahead of us when at any moment we can be reminded that no, we don’t. And as it is for relationships with loved ones, so it is for the settled conditions of one’s own life – as in Letellier’s fulfilling one as a privileged executive in the city.
This wise and funny show goes on a little too long, and a couple of times I thought a wrap-up was imminent when it wasn’t. But it’s a charmer and well worth seeing, whether you’re a sophisticated urbanite or someone perfectly happy with “sushi from the Sunoco.” The Village Cidiot has three more performances at New York City Fringe, April 14, 16 and 19.
