Show Business Weekly review
www.showbusinessweekly.com
Tarot Reading: Love, Sex and Mommy
Review by Jennifer Prestigiacomo
Competing in Moth StorySLAMs by night and working as a Fox News producer by day, Kimberlee Auerbach certainly enjoys exploring the comedy in her life. Her one-woman, self-produced show Tarot Reading: Love, Sex and Mommy in this year's New York Fringe Festival plays out as an extended story slam, colored by a reading of the tarot cards.
Aside from the initial technical gaffe and Auerbach's occasional line requests, Tarot Reading is an enjoyable telling of the common conundrum many women in their 30s face as they deal with friend and familial pressures to get hitched and have kids. Auerbach, who is 32 and bases the play on her own experiences, struggles initially to quell the quaver in her voice as she wrestles with yearning for greater in her life and accepting who she is. Sure, it's a universal theme, but Auerbach's sincerity draws you closer like the stranger you
meet at a dinner party who tells the most colorful, self-deprecating stories.
The performance alternates between Auerbach's personal tales and her tarot reading. The idea is an interesting one, but gets a bit cumbersome and protracted with the video of Iris, the tarot card reader projected on a screen interspersed with Auerbach speaking to the audience. Touching on topics like child abuse, sibling rivalry and crabs, Auerbach never focuses too long on one subject, which benefits this breezy, one-hour affair. You almost want to cheer when Auerbach finds her "higher self," a black woman named Malvina, and gets
unexpectedly pulled upstairs during a party by her boyfriend Eric, who takes her willingly from behind. What lies in the cards for Auerbach is unknown, but for now, all that can be said is that her genuine talent for storytelling will likely create entertaining chapters in the future.