Review: Natalie Palamides: WEER at Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Mark, a walking red flag draped in plaid, is trying to reason with Christina, Baby Phat Barbie, as she tearfully calls him out for his wandering eye. Facing stage-left, Mark winks at the audience, hoping somewhere he has an ally. Facing stage-right, Christina pulls an exaggerated frown, shooting daggers at the audience member seated front-and-center, serving as the object for her boyfriend’s flirtation. In stitches, the audience howls as a single performer flips to face stage-left, then stage-right. Stage-left, then stage-right, at any one moment only showing one side of this story. This is the effervescent weirdness of Natalie Palamides’ WEER.

Palamides, a Los Angeles-based clown, has been a fine-feathered friend of the Fringe since 2017, when she debuted her solo show, LAID, and won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer. The following year, Palamides returned with a gender-bent one-person show called NATE, winning the 2018 Total Theatre Award for Innovation. Plucked by Amy Poehler’s production company, NATE was captured and released for streaming on Netflix in 2020.

Her return to Fringe is a dizzying dramedy. As a performer, Palamides finds herself split down the middle, one half of her body portraying Mark, the other Christina. The conceit makes for some side-splitting choreography that allows Palamides to showcase the depth of her deftness for clowning. As both Mark and Christina, she receives and rejects kisses, plays tug-of-war with a jacket sleeve, juggles car keys, and copulates. Over the course of this tour-de-forced relationship for the millennium, Mark and Christina relive their love story, desperately clinging to the three years they’ve shared in the wake of a tragicomic accident.

The stage itself becomes a site of wreckage as Mark and Christina lay waste to their fairy tale in a wash of blood and mud. Gimmicks abound with pieces of the set revealed by flung-aside duvetyne on a pull string and a hollowed-out carcass careening in from above. Despite the chaos, the so-obviously-wrong-that-they’re-right toxicity of Mark and Christina, the audience is with them from the jump, participation and all. It’s nearly an hour and a half of havoc that the proscenium cannot contain. There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it anticipation in watching Palamides tear across the stage.

Though as she spins out of control, there are moments when you can hardly stand to watch. For once, there’s a violence to Mark and Christina that not even Looney Tunes can justify. A shotgun, one of Mark’s most prized family possessions, is as at-the-ready as a fist. As the dead horse is sufficiently beaten, I found myself wishing that Palamides herself, not just the character Christina, could disentangle herself from Mark. Perhaps I’m taking this far too seriously, but for me, it’s all fun and games until the firearm comes out. While the onslaught of false endings indicates an utter lack of seriousness (as if that wasn’t already abundantly clear) it’s a challenge to keep laughing as Christina rolls with the punches, even if, in a way, it’s her own hand throwing them.

And yet, it’s some of the most fun I’ve ever had, a brilliant entry to this year’s Fringe. WEER is the slap in slapstick. It’s a shock that hits with a sting, but as you touch your hand to your cheek, you’re smiling.

Natalie Palamides: WEER is performed at the Traverse Theatre until August 25. Tickets are available here.