Review: Guo Back to Your Country
Annie Guo is one to keep your eye on – and FYI, she’s from Albany.
What do seagulls, NPC fathers, and Tinder bios have to do with each other? Annie Guo manages to braid together these unexpected paraphernalia and more in Guo Back to Your Country, a hilariously wonderful hour of anecdotes and misspelled texts gathered over a decade of navigating life in Aotearoa... all in her second language to boot.
Just like her explosive entrance into the intimate 50-seat space, Annie’s solo hour debut packs a punch, turning the Q Theatre Cellar into a sell-out show. Her stories of intercultural flops and wins shimmer overhead in a chaotic flight map of family, perseverance, and identity. While she says she’s accepted her fate as the awkward introvert at parties who hopes desperately to be adopted, in performance, Annie is actually the mum (or “daddy”?) of the friend group. Her crowd work is reflexive and heartful and has the diverse Tāmaki Makaurau crowd on their toes, literally.
As the audience delves deeper into Annie lore, they are melting in peals of laughter not only from the punchlines but also from her overflowing wholesomeness – Annie has this bubbly, innocent charm which doesn’t falter, even after serving up a left-field dose of divine dark humour. At the core of her stories, though, is the very human call to have empathy for the journey each of us has taken to arrive and gather here in this country. Subconsciously or not, in our daily lives, we all draw on stereotypes, and as time goes on, “practise makes perfect… discrimination”.
At the end of the night, a beaming Annie bows to her crowd. Once the thunderous applause and cheers subside, she reminds them that while her craft involves “joking around on the stage”, there’s one thing she hopes they’ll take home to practise while out and about: “don’t judge people through stereotypes, but try to see them as they are”.
