THE LAST CROISSANT

by Veronica Tjioe

The Attic Collective
Hollywood Fringe Festival
Broadwater Mainstage

Los Angeles, California
June 2019

“Will you find what you’re looking for in the woods? In Veronica Tjioe’s The Last Croissant, three sets of campers, forced to share a single cramped campsite, must come to terms with their own crises, whether it be mysterious origami cranes, rapidly vanishing snacks, or overly zealous bird-watching husbands. Combining dark humor with magical realism, The Last Croissant will surprise you at every turn, subverting gender norms and upending theater stereotypes.”

A production of Veronica Tjioe’s camping farce which strived to capture the transformative quality of finding oneself in nature through celebration, creative casting, and larger-than-life committed performances. The piece began with the cast, dressed in camping attire, serenading the audience as they waited to enter the theatre and inviting them to join. The audience was then led into the theatre to watch the cast “set up camp”, assembling the intricate, whimsical set before their eyes as they continued to sing. The actors then transformed into their characters as the audience watched, a symbolic invitation to spend the next 90 minutes broadening their outlook on identity for the actors as well as for themselves.

The Last Croissant deliberately grapples with and subverts the formulas and tropes of traditional stock farces, and this is reflected in its specification to cast a man in the role of the long-suffering wife and a woman in the role of the ambitious husband. Great care went into making sure that this casting was treated as an opportunity to broaden the audience’s gender expectations as opposed to using it as a source of mockery- while these characters are funny, they are funny because of what they say, not what they look like while they say it. Another element which encouraged the audience’s imagination was the use of live foley using conventional objects. Having actors dressed in their “camper” outfits sitting in plain sight of the audience while crinkling a plastic bag to create the sound of sparks from a fire, simulating bird calls using a whistle, and flapping a gardening glove to simulate the sound of a bird flying by established the audience as being in on the magic-making process.