Colchester Fringe Festival 2025
Who The Hell Is Climbing My Family Tree?
Kurkendaal Barrett Presentations
Genre: Theatre
Venue: The Dragonfly Lounge
Festival: Colchester Fringe Festival
Low Down
Be prepared to be disappointed with your ancestors, as the revelations in this show contain real surprises, not just for the performer!
Review
Les Kirkendaal Barrett thrilled and educate4d audiences last year with his show The Real Black Swann: Confessions of America’s First Black Drag Queen. Equally informative, his new show reveals his ancestry and family tree, and contains enough surprises and twists to keep the audience enthralled for an hour! Les is given an AncestryDNA kit for his birthday and he gets results that he is not expecting. Not only is he introduced to a wealth of family history, he gets a huge surprise. Les is Black. His parents are black. Why are his ancestors white? He also uncovers a 100-year-old murder mystery that needs to be solved.
It’s that meeting with his 99-year-old grandfather, and his surprise confession, “I killed a man”, that provides the spine of the show. (And it provides a nice gag, “Thank you, you’ve given me my next Fringe show!”) Presented in the form of a lecture, together with power point and photographs, the story is fantastic, and revelation after revelation keeps us hooked as the piece is perfectly plotted. There are discoveries that, as the old saying goes, you couldn’t make up, and coincidences begin to abound as we get closer to the present day. But the piece is also a potted history of the United States, and underlines current threats to rewrite history by the present administration and law makers.
One of the many strengths of the piece is Kirkendaal’s style, the guy is cool and welcoming, and pitches his emotional responses perfectly. It’s like a live episode of Who Do You Think You Are, and given the fascinating revelations, that’s well worth the comparison. Staged at the new venue The Dragonfly Lounge, it is a good setting for work like this, but they do need to adjust the technical provision somewhat, there isn’t enough light on the front of the stage. Performers should be lit! This not the fault of the show technician, it’s maybe just the venue is not usually geared up for plays rather than cabaret. That aside, this fascinating and entertaining lecture performance will make you feel that your ancestors are really not up to dramatic scratch!
