A surrealist display of the harsh reality of gender politics, Absolutely Reliable! is transfixing and provocative.
 

By Lee Delong and Ralf Wetzel

Directed by Lee Delong

With Ralf Wetzel

Masks created by Stephen John Cooper

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Absolutely Reliable! Is a solo mask dark comedy that confronts toxic masculinity head-on in a delightfully comic monologue that follows George through an examination of his male vulnerability and suppressed aggression. In a timely response to the #metoo movement, George negotiates the tangled web of his increasingly darker side. A surrealistic, rollicking, slightly creepy look into his world sheds tender light on just how bad alpha-male culture can get.

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George is a white, middle aged, middle class, middle manager desperate for female attention. Just as he appears to be getting closer to the object of his desire, he swirls in a maelstrom of denial, anger, and insecurity. George oscillates between love and loss, death and birth, and never ever finds his deeper self.

Director and co-writer Lee Delong has transformed George’s anxieties and traumas into a raw investigation of contemporary gender norms using dark comedy. Co-author Ralf Wetzel wears a mask that fits him like a glove. It has a transfixing power and sometimes one forgets that it’s a mask, so much so that Wetzel plays two distinct characters - male and female - with only one mask. Negotiating a labyrinth of increasingly comic situations, George is peeled away like an onion to reveal a surprising truth.