The Big Secret is on the RISK! Podcast and  the Minnesota Fringe Festival!

Hey everyone, I am going to deviate a bit from my usual essays about being a doofus abroad to let everyone know that right now, two big things are happening with my solo show, The Big Secret. First, it is on the RISK! Podcast as their main episode for the week (link below) and I am performing it at the Minnesota Fringe Festival starting on Sunday. I will be in Minneapolis for the next twelve days before swinging back home for Hotsy Totsy’s tribute to Zombie films. So, if you want to hear me, see me, or punch me in the face, so many opportunities.

Here’s all the shameless self promotion.

On the RISK! Podcast as of 7/29!

https://www.risk-show.com/podcast/the-big-secret/

And at the Minnesota Fringe -

Minnesota Fringe 

at Rarig Center Arena Theater

Saturday 8/2 - 5:30pm

Sunday 8/3 - 1pm

Wednesday 8/6 - 10pm

Friday 8/8 - 8:30 pm

Sunday 8/10 - 7pm

bit.ly/bigminn

At fourteen, Brad Lawrence made a promise to keep a secret for his friend Jessica, a secret that, decades later, he realizes may have contributed to her untimely death at the hands of her abusive husband. Brad and Jessica’s story begins in an Evangelical youth group, where they form an unlikely bond amid apocalyptic sermons and purity culture. Years later, Jessica was murdered and Brad’s silence, born of loyalty and habit, kept her truth locked away just as she had told it to him—until the world events forced him to confront whether he had kept her story faithfully, or if he had let secrecy warp her memory and her loss.

Reviews - 

To be a voice for the voiceless is a responsibility few are boldly willing to take. Writer and performer Brad Lawrence does just that. His original debut was to a sold out show at Gotham in 2023 and now Brad Lawrence’s triumphant return of The Big Secret presented by FRIGID New York is layered with new heart wrenching stories with an updated ending. The Big Secret is a reflection on how a friendship in high school has an influence that spans decades long on Lawrence. The show is all about how he manages the weight of keeping a lifelong secret that leads to a less than welcoming outcome for the fate of his beloved friend. Lawrence prepares us on a storytelling regalia of the stark contrast of life in 1980s America meeting the confines of ecclesiastical insubordination in the most dubious and unpredictable way. 

Brad Lawrence is not only a skilled raconteur but the first person to be a back-to-back winner of Moth GrandSLAMS. In his witty, hyper-focused and candid way, Lawrence keeps you laughing, smiling, engaged and always contemplative. There are moments where he pauses to look right at the audience to embrace quiet moments riddled in thought and mystery where as an audience you can collectively gasp, aww and ooh at the intimacy in his approach. Lawrence displays impenetrable confidence in his telling of a story in that of a character that seemingly lacks confidence, it is almost as if in his nuances and gestures, Lawrence knows what we as an audience are really feeling and thinking.

 There is a cool confidence in his demeanor as he gently whisks you away back to 1986 when he was a mere mullet wearing, dorky teen facing an existential crisis path in choosing relation to self and a higher power. In a moment so many of us can dreadfully relate, we experience a sermon by his pastor reminding us all of how love, sex and passion are for sinners who never plan on entering the pearly gates of heaven, how even the mere thought of lust and sex is enough to cast you off to h-e-double toothpicks. As some of us in the audience can relate to the fear and dread of times where we were told we might be veered off into the fiery gates of hell if we choose to not accept a “holy path”, we as an audience collectively erupt into a roaring laughter. Lawrence somehow masterfully creates a camaraderie for all of us to laugh and feel anger or rage together.  He does all this through his use of skillfully woven storytelling, clever use of words, a streamlined approach that seemingly takes us inside his mind as a young impressionable boy who now needs to navigate his adolescence through purity of thought and action. 

Lawrence recounts his impoverished upbringing and particularly his relationship with his older stepbrother seethingly trying to crawl under his evangelical skin with blasphemous thoughts that make him confront his commitment to his faith. The journey leads us all to his profound love and admiration for one of the girls in his youth group, Jessica, who unbeknownst to him at the time leads him on a friendship to fulfill his melancholy as the true misfit in school he feels he is. He is then confronted with her big secret that stretches his entire life as he comes across discovering the reason for her untimely death. The Big Secret is really the big question that perplexes us all in life, does keeping a secret ultimately affect another person's fate? If you had known that a secret could potentially change the course of someone’s life otherwise, would you have revealed their secret? Does gatekeeping a secret somehow make you sort of a master of another person’s destiny? These are all the questions Lawrence keeps us riddling throughout. 

-Bianca Lopez, Theatre Beyond Broadway - https://bit.ly/bigsecrev

With an updated version of 2023's The Big Secret, storyteller Brad Lawrence returns to UNDER St Marks with another outstanding solo performance. Hilarious and moving, Lawrence takes us through what ultimately becomes a decade-spanning consideration of and tribute to a formative friendship. At the same time, Lawrence's looking back over this particular relationship acts as a meditation on and exhortation to resist the ways that institutions, including church, patriarchy, and family, can damagingly distort both people's selves and their stories.

While The Big Secret does eventually end up in the recent past, most of the show focuses on a few pivotal years beginning when Lawrence was 14. Through an anecdote about a youth group event at which the youth pastor preached against the horrors of premarital sex–teen pregnancy, AIDS, drug addiction, and, of course, abortion–we are introduced to Lawrence's friend Jessica. Since the kids in the youth group are from different schools, it offers them a chance to try on different identities, personas, and social positions, and Lawrence's organically evolving friendship with the confident, charismatic, and slightly older young woman is something that, he notes, would never have happened amongst his peers at school. He in fact describes both his school and home lives as lonely and scary, the latter involving a fractured household burdened by economic pressures, loss, and the exploding meth epidemic. The arrival of Lawrence's adult step-brother Jeff back at the family home emerges as an important narrative strand and experience that turns out to completely upend and reframe Lawrence's perceptions of what is important. Guilt, whether justified or not, is one thing that unites these stories and–along with a recent Supreme Court decision–catalyzes the show's questioning of how someone like Jessica was made to see herself and how that affected the path that her life took.

Although the show begins with Lawrence talking about when he will talk about the titular secret, one could really see the title as alluding to multiple secrets, especially if one draws a partial parallel between Jessica and Jeff as people whose struggles to stay on or find the 'right' path may have been hidden to most. The show also affectingly presses the audience to think about our relationship to the deaths of others and the ways in which we individually and communally (mis)remember the deceased and their stories. Lawrence brings a rich, vivid life to the people, places, and conversations that he recounts, masterfully controlling the peaks and valleys of energy and emotion in the show. The Big Secret asks audiences to help remember its central subject, and given its own memorability, that should not be a problem.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards, ThinkingTheaterNYC - https://bit.ly/bigsecrev2