RIVER HUSTON
Comedienne, Author, Poet & Girl With a Big Mouth

Standup comic, award winning poet, sex columnist, public speaker, aerobics instructor, cabbie, musician, pot farmer, dominatrix, armed robber, there is more but she only has an hour and twenty minutes to put it together in a hilarious performance.

The former poet laureate of Bucks County is taking these experiences and musings as a part of the 11th annual New York International Fringe Festival-FringeNYC. River opened Sex, Cellulite, and Large Farm Equipment: One Girls Guide to Living and Dying March 2004 at the Society Hill Playhouse in Philadelphia to rave reviews:

“Huston’s well timed delivery, sharp observations and her physically manic demonstrations are continuously humorous and often hilarious.” say Doug Keating of The Philadelphia Inquirer. “This is not a show for the easily offended.” say Tammy Poglino of The Courier Post. Her New York Debut in 2006 garnered an impressed audience, “Huston is a fantastic performer and my gaze never strayed from her larger than life presence on stage.” Richard Hinijosa, NYtheater.com.

For the last two years she has taken the show on the road to theaters around the country fine-tuning her material in hundreds of towns and cities from Miami to Los Angeles and everywhere in between.

Described as blunt and irreverent, River Huston has been giving performances around the world for the last 16 years to audiences ranging from 40,000 in Japan to sorority and fraternity brothers across the nations to little old ladies at a Unitarian Church. She decided to morph her stand-up comedy and lectures into a theatrical performance that takes a hard and humorous look at her life experiences including an arrest for obscenity, running a marathon, dating, marriage, financial ruin, living with AIDS, surviving an unpronounceable bleeding disorder and several unexplained rashes.

Directed by Cheryl King, the director of Stage Left Studio, the only solo show repertory in New York City. After a 13 year career in comedy, she created her own solo show, the internationally acclaimed “not a nice girl”. This led to the formation of Cheryl King Productions and Stage Left Studio in midtown Manhattan. She is also the Artistic Director of Sola Voce: Estrogenius at ManhattanTheatreSource, and resident acting coach at the acclaimed daytime drama, All My Children, at ABC. Her television credits include ABC's 20/20, Oprah! and Faking It, on TLC. Ms. King is an advisory board member of ARIA and a member of the Dramatists Guild.

The first review in in:

Sex, Cellulite and Large Farm Equipment: One Girls Guide To Living and Dying
reviewed by Shannon Thomason
Aug 9, 2008

Sex, Cellulite & Large Farm Equipment: One Girl's Guide to Living & Dying is a smart, funny, one-hour, one-woman show. Something that's not easy to come by. Three words guaranteed to strike terror in my heart are: one-woman show. I want them to be good, but I usually find myself trapped in a space that's a little too intimate being yelled at by someone who talks a lot but doesn't say anything.

River Huston has plenty to say and does so with a delivery that doesn't intimidate or manipulate her audience. And the stories are good. Sitting in the audience, we want to know what's going to happen next. During the course of the show, we visit different moments in the author/performer's life. It is not a linear telling; time shifts around to include the moments she learned she was HIV positive, met her first husband, was arrested for obscenity, was a fitness trainer, became a poet, and many others. It's a lot to keep track of. Some of the transitions are a little off-balance and could include more detail (what was it like being arrested? how did she get to Mexico in the first place?). However, not all the explicit details are left out. There is a section that deals with safe sex and the tools it requires. But the subject isn't there to anger or shock. It simply is what it is. It's part of her story.

Cheryl King's direction gives the show a good pace and strikes a lovely balance between the monologues, re-creations, and poetry. The poems are extensions of the stories and are woven in well. Moments when River's mother appears as she sinks into her hip and puffs an ever-present cigarette are used to great effect without being overdone.

Huston is a storyteller. Like the best of her kind, she lets the story do the work, without trying to force it into becoming something else. She offers up her tales and lets the audience decide what to do with them. In the end, we sympathize with Huston as we laugh with her and get angry with her, but never at her.

Written/created by: River Huston
Directed by Cheryl King
Presented by River Huston

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