berserker the play . the play

Berserker will next be presented the weekend of April 17-20, 2008, as the opening production of the Black and Latino Queer Performance Festival at Northwestern University at the Hal & Martha Hyer Wallis Theater, Evanston, IL.

For more information and ticket reservations, please call the Dept. of Performance Studies at Northwestern - 847.491.3171 - or contact us at info@berserkertheplay.com.

Berserker received a Best of the Fringe Award for Best Male Dramatic Solo at the 2003 San Francisco Fringe Festival and was one of the productions named by the New York Sun as Best of the Fringe at the 2003 New York International Fringe Festival.

SF Bay Times:
Outlaw’s performance is raw, riveting, often perverse, and decidedly unsettling.

The New York Sun:
Berserker looks deep into our personal and national enthrallment with killers. Outlaw is a generous performer, making delicate transitions from character to character. The performance’s final moving tableau combines repulsion and love for these distinctly American killers, and for our stubborn fascination with them.

nytheatre.com:
I am intrigued by Outlaw’s portrayals of Turner and Dahmer, and his ability to bring to life parallels to these two seemingly different men while illuminating the dark obsessions within himself. The texts serve as a springboard for the even more interesting autobiographical portions… brutally honest and arousing.

americantheaterweb.com:
Berserker, perhaps the most epic of works seen so far at the [New York International] Fringe [Festival], offers its own kind of discreet charm.

SF Weekly:
Some shows [at the San Francisco Fringe Festival] aren't serious, but others are real and provocative works of exploration, like Paul Outlaw's Berserker, a one-man show about Nat Turner, Jeffrey Dahmer, race, and homosexuality. Juxtaposing a cannibalistic serial killer like Dahmer with a murderous anti-slavery insurrectionist like Turner may seem bizarre, but the notion behind it -- which Outlaw never mentions in the show -- is that both men exhibited "berserker" tendencies. Berserkers were Scandinavian warriors who lapsed into a trancelike frenzy on the battlefield. Working from texts both killers left behind (along with other writing by Essex Hemphill and Samuel R. Delany, as well as stories from Outlaw's own life), Outlaw maps the dark intersection between violence and sexual frenzy.

Berserker is not for the fainthearted. And it sounds self-indulgent. In lesser hands the show would be insufferable, but Outlaw is a seasoned performer who's mounted shows in New York, Berlin, and L.A.; his control here is formidable. On a plastic-covered stage he drifts between personas, from

the country-Southern voice of Turner, describing his long rampage with a small army of slaves through the homes of white people in Virginia (in August 1831), to the warped and sullen-voiced Dahmer, talking about meeting black boys in and around Milwaukee, taking them home, killing them with a barbell, and packing their meat in the fridge.

Outlaw also describes his own sexual coming-of-age in the '70s. He gives a cheeky description of his first blow job, at 14, and the older man who seduced him: "If we'd been caught, George would have been arrested for child molestation. But I wanted him to touch me."

And later, even more chillingly, he says, "I was a tall, skinny, twentysomething black man," like most of Dahmer's victims. If Outlaw had wandered through Milwaukee in the early '80s, "Chances are I would have ended up in Jeffrey Dahmer's refrigerator."

Outlaw performs mostly naked. He takes a meat tenderizer to three big tomatoes and a knife to bulging Hefty sacks filled with strips of newspaper, movie popcorn, and what looks like shredded beets. Near the end of the show his stage is an unholy mess of those things and some kind of green goo. Then, amid this colorful wreckage, he picks up a microphone and gives a frank, cabaret-style confession about living in Berlin as a gay black American during the 1980s. This confession is the weakest part of the show, if only because Outlaw is such a talented actor that it's a shame to watch him stop acting. But even with the final speech his performance holds up as a provocative trip through racial rage, murder, and lust, to that still point where it's possible even for an outcast like him to feel human -- and American -- again.