“Shit Show” or Everyone That Needs to go to the Bathroom Should Go Now: Personal Experiences No One Thinks They Need to Know

Through a comic one-woman show, I will involve the audience in an exploration of my own personal stories and experiences with menstruation and feces. I purpose to break down some of the stigma that is associated with bodily functions by talking about them with open and blunt language and dialogue throughout the performance. One person shows have arguably been around ever since the first storytellers. While this show would be different in the nature of the stories being told, it would follow a very similar theatrical tradition by having one person narrate a story in a way that made the audience feel as if they were present within the room where it was happening. My primary focus in these stories will be on how we view periods and feces as a society and the unnatural feelings of shame that are associated with these two functions. Although I will mention other bodily functions briefly, I will spearhead this show behind those two functions in order to give the performance a definite shape and focus. This performance will include my own personal stories that I will retell by using present-tense language in order to fully engage the audience with what is happening on stage and to drive the action and plot of each story forward. At the end of this process I will have created a fully formed one-woman show that was performed June 9th, 2019 at 5:15pm in the Rice Auditorium Black Box. I aim to have the show’s run time be approximately 30-45 minutes