My Acid Trip

Published in Naked in Academe anthology, UBC Press, 2014

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Contact Michael Petrasek at Kensington Literary Representation for performance rights information.


Review

Dennis Foon’s My Acid Trip is among the best plays I’ve seen this fall. Foon’s script is about a guy who grows up ashamed of and repelled by his father, who has such bad psoriasis that he leaves flakes all over the house. The narrator turns into a rebellious, drug-taking kid who thinks that he would be a better person if he’d been raised by his handsome but dead, great uncle Moische who everybody in his family idealizes.

The theatricality is concrete: the narrator introduces a raw potato, tar cream, the Old Testament, and a hit of blotter acid off the top, and they all get used. The script is a wittily eccentric and moving prayer of atonement—largely for the cowardice of hero-worship.

Actor Todd Thomson is a knockout. His performance is as frantically full of life—and exuberant details—as a Jackson Pollock painting. Director Camyar Chai fuels this sense of vivacity. He makes the character a kind of standup confessor who strides manically in and out of his spotlight
—Colin Thomas, Georgia Straight