It's been 24 hours since I enjoyed this play and I'm still reeling from the super intelligent "trance-formation" delivered with rapid fire accuracy by Robert Dubac's one man show Book of Moron. Dubac plays out the thought patterns of a man who has traumatically lost a portion of his memory and is trying to "remember what he has forgotten". Along the way he employs the inner voices of His Common Sense, His Voice of Reason, His Scruples, His Inner Moron, His Inner Child, His Inner Moron and His Inner Asshole. Dubac even throws in a little real stage magic to show the audience how his character finds his way to the Truth.
In Dubac's world, even The Truth is a multi-leveled thing and he begins opening the doors in his brain to The Illusion of Truth, The Truth and The Whole Truth and Nothing but The Truth. Along the way, Dubac uses props like a box he climbs in and out of to represent our thinking "inside the box" and demonstrates clearly how TV has dumbed down an entire population by bombarding us with 9th grade reading level clichés and factoids about the Kardashians.
Dubac tackles Sex, Media, Politics, and other inflammatory subjects like abortion and the death sentence with humor by pointing out the inconsistencies in thinking behind each and possibly aggravating all the different groups. But he manages to bring it all together by turning a literal mirror on the audience and concluding that when all the other letters of the "Illusions" are erased from the blackboard of his mind all that is left is "US".
Dubac points out the obvious thing we have all forgotten that we are people who all share the same heartbeat, the same planet who have much more in our minds that unite us than the "Illusions of Truth" we have been programmed to accept which divide us.
Dubac is also the author of the one man show The Male Intellect, An Oxymoron? and told the audience he is developing a new show called Stand Up Jesus.
I was completely blown away by his total control of his complex, fast moving text AND his audience’s reactions for 90 straight minutes with no intermission that I went to purchase his DVD The Male Intellect, an Oxymoron? After the show, because that's a subject I really love to examine.
Dubac welcomed a just few questions from the audience at the end of the show because it was a "union house and he needed to get out of the theater faster than usual" but after the show at his merch table I got to ask him my burning question - he brought up Jesus several times during the show and seemed to be working his way to a higher spiritual "Truth" in the show but never really reached it . So, I asked him "Do you believe in Jesus?"
Without any hesitation at all he smiled broadly and said "Oh, I AM Jesus!" and I laughed and tapped him on the heart center and said without hesitation, "Me too!"
The show was so full of provocative ideas delivered in such a way to disarm and inform us that it made me eager to see the process of his developing of his new piece, Stand Up Jesus which he will be workshopping at Zanies next Monday (March 2nd) and Tuesday (March 3rd) here in Chicago.
Book of Moron was delivered in a way that reminded me of a much funnier version of the 1970's transformational group EST, "It Is" , The Werner Erhard Training which over the course of 48 hours caused participants to rethink their entire belief systems in such a way as to free their minds from the belief systems that were holding them back.
Dubac manages to do almost the same thing in a record breaking 90-minute show.
Enjoying Book of Moron live feels much like slowing down your brain long enough to clean it with fizzy water and then hitting it with a pleasant jolt of electricity to get it started again.
I highly recommend seeing this marvelous and fast paced show right now, especially for thinking people who have become brain weary and overwhelmed by the last few years of the "fake facts' mentality.
You can catch Robert Dubac’s Book of Moron at Broadway Playhouse through Sunday, March 1st. for more show information click here or visit www.RobertDubac.com.
