Performing "Buen Camino" in Kona

Exactly a year ago I was in the final stretch of rehearsals for opening night of Buen Camino in Los Angeles. My rehearsals leading up to the show were by Zoom at 5:00 a.m. because my director, Jessica Lynn Johnson, lives in Florida. I rehearsed doggedly, I had never been on stage in a one person show in my life and I had friends coming from every corner of the country to see me perform three days before Christmas.

I prepared hard—running my show from start to finish twice a day. At one point my director asked me to perform in front of a handful of friends to test out where the laugh lines were, where it seemed to drag, what was surprising. So seven stalwart gals squeezed into one side of my dining room while I performed my show without sound effects, without the voice overs, without the video clips, and without lighting. My intrepid friends sat eighteen inches from where I stood, shouted, cried, and performed one of the most important stories of my life. In all the performances I’ve done since then I have never felt more exposed or less able. It was hard.

But I got the kind of feedback I needed. I could feel the places that the story moved too slowly, or where I should have waited for the laughs. I knew the show needed to be cut by a third. I am indebted to those friends for making room for a rough version of what I was doing and helping me to make it better.

Over this past year, I have performed Buen Camino more than forty times. I’ve revised it significantly four times, cutting the show from ninety minutes to sixty. I’ve added scenes that made the story truer and cut scenes that I loved but that had to go for the sake of time. My characters have deepened and the story is as true and unvarnished as I know how to make it.

So now, almost exactly a year later, I finally get to perform the show for my friends in Kona in a real theater, with real lights, with sound and projections and a tight script—a show entirely different from the one they saw in my dining room.

It feels fitting for me to come full circle in this way, to travel across the globe to perform in front of international audiences as a way of making Buen Camino the best show it can be and to then get to offer it to the people who have been with me from the beginning. Even my stage manager from Edinburgh Fringe, Emily Currier, is coming all the way from Baltimore to run the tech for my show so absolutely nothing will go wrong.

I want the show in Kona to be the best show I’ve done—not only because it’s what I’ve worked on for a year to perfect, but mostly because there’s something important to me about performing for the people I live among and love, for friends who I hope will see Buen Camino as if for the first time.

Kona Elks Lodge Theater | 6pm January 14 & 2pm January 17 | Get Tickets »