Who Are I?

Theatre Askew plays the same-name game

A A A Comments By Julia Wallace Tuesday, Jun 26 2007

Jason Schafer

Porn stars =/= shirts: Nathan Blew in I Google Myself

Details

I Google Myself
By Jason Shafer
Under St. Mark's
94 St. Mark's Place
212-352-3101

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When I Google myself, most of the search results refer me to a woman who was nastily bludgeoned in 1931, in one of the most famous unsolved murders of all time. Perusing the hundreds of websites dedicated to her always stirs up in me a complicated mixture of curiosity and resentment. The weird new emotions that Google provokes are the focus of former Queer As Folkwriter Jason Shafer's new comedy, I Google Myself. When a creepy, balloon-obsessed man who works at Home Depot (Tim Cusack) types his name into a search engine, he discovers that he shares it with a porn star (Nathan Blew). He, in turn, stole the moniker from a childhood nemesis (John Gardner), a poetry-blogging auto mechanic. Balloon Man convinces Porn Star and Auto Mechanic to meet with him, and the three end up coming together again and again, under increasingly strange and farcical circumstances, until they have all been injured by each other, both physically and emotionally, several times over. Actor Cusack and director Jason Jacobs are founding partners of the gay company Theatre Askew, and I Google Myselfis queer in the best sense of the word: self-consciously outside of the mainstream, looking in with intelligence and wit.