Ben Target in Lorenzo (Photo: Carol Rosegg)

Before the show Lorenzo starts, writer and star Ben Target wanders through the theater offering you a cup of coffee from a thermos and inquiring about your fantasy death. We each have a little card to write down one sentence on the subject.

And honestly this might have been a bit too much even for a show that was going to be about grief and death—there was a warning on the sign outside the theater for the subject matter.

Suddenly, I have the pressure to whip up something funny or thoughtful while I’m mentally running through all the ways I don’t want to die in my head. And I’m feeling badly my plus one is fretting about audience participation. I then got a little confused about what this even meant—did he mean a goring by a unicorn or some version of death you truly preferred? I would never have played such an exercise in life. I’m too Italian superstitious for this. We don’t joke about death.

I did not expect to feel so stressed out by this and it set the show on the wrong foot for me. Once you set off someone’s anxiety loop, good luck stopping it.

Target’s storytelling show is about ending up as a caretaker for his elderly uncle, Lorenzo, during the pandemic. Lorenzo was an architect from Hong Kong and unofficially adopted into Target’s family as an adult when he was working for Target’s grandparents who were also architects. He was the silly uncle who was irreverent, inventive, and tolerant in ways the rest of his family were not. Now in his 80s, he’s let some suspicious people move into his home who might be robbing him, and he’s in need of constant physical care.

Target occasionally sprinkles in some lite carpentry (I was sort of expecting more to be honest from the marketing materials) while telling the story of Lorenzo’s upbringing at the hands of his drug dealing, smuggler parents, his increasing frailty, and Target’s own frustrations with the way his own life is going.

The show introduces us to some unfamiliar topics such as cuckooing—where criminals move into a vulnerable person’s house and exploit them to carry out their criminal enterprise as well as the difference between Asian and Western saws.

Though at its heart it is about the care we need through life, the care we may not have gotten from our parents, and the family bonds that form even if you are not blood relatives. Only lightly touched on in the piece are some interesting strands about Target’s tensions with his kleptomaniac mother, a neglected childhood, and his bisexuality.

But for the most part Target is detailing the physical care and emotional weight of managing his life in aid of Lorenzo. Target tries to create some acts of physical business during the show (again could have used more carpentry) and the audience interaction about fantasy death, a game he used to play with Lorenzo.

During the show I attended the selected stories were kind of expected (death during an orgasm or eating a really good ice cream sundae, or both) or a bit of a cheat (after a long life, well lived, and dramatically). Because someone’s watch alarm went off and broke the rhythm of the show, we got an extra one (someone wanted to die in their 100s). We had to vote on who had the better one. I did not enjoy this exercise from start to finish.

Death and care are not easy subjects to talk about. But we got more of the quotidian elements of this story rather than the deeper background. It’s a 65-minute Edinburgh Fringe show so there is not a ton of time but the harder stuff to talk about was what I was craving. The how we got here. Target mentions a mental breakdown, distance from his family (save the cousins who are also helping out with Lorenzo), and a relationship that came and went. Am I being nosy wanting a little more context for why he chose to be a carer for Lorenzo, how this family dynamic played into things, and what was going through his head a bit more. Maybe. But the emotional crux of the show was buried in this stuff and Target felt like he was holding back on it.

One of the tricks sometimes with storytelling is the author creates an ease so you feel more willing to share or participate. Here, Target’s energy was a bit more anxious and smothering in the pre-show. He addresses early in the show, with a bit of a joke, the fact that his director Adam Brace died before the show was complete. And to blame him if the show did not work.

Brace, widely known and beloved in the UK, is less known here, though folks who saw Alex Edelman’s show, Just for Us, might recognize his name from that. But even in jest, the self-deprecation about the show matched that anxious energy I got during coffee time.

There was not a trust built between artist and audience from the start. With some of us still wearing masks in the room, it is not as if this show is being performed in the absence of pandemic anxiety.

But there was a wall here for me. A dishonesty (or again perhaps just a shadowy reticence) somewhere in the material that I could not put my finger on.