Annie Lujan and Veronica Hortiguela have been best friends and collaborators since high school. Both studied clowning while in theatre conservatory programs at TMU and Concordia, respectively, and, once they started working as a team, received a Canada Council grant to study clown full time.

“It feels like fifteen years has gone into making this show,” says Ms. Lujan. “A lifelong connection with a friend, another woman, and learning how to share that synergy and connection with an audience.” 

Since its premiere at the Fringe, MONKS has been a runaway success, first at the Crow’s Theatre cabaret series, then the Theatre Centre, and now at County Stage.

“Clown is a word people have a lot of definitions for,” Ms. Lujan noted. “All it needs to mean for the sake of our show is there’s no fourth wall, meaning, we’re with our audience the entire time.”

Ms. Lujan and Ms. Hortiguela perform a style known as “Idiot Work,” a modern form of clown centered around the principles of audience, commitment, presence, connection, and risk.

Ms. Lujan, who splits her time between the County and Toronto, describes MONKS as “a tale of two brothers who really want to do nothing on their day off — and chaos ensues.”

Once the pair earned a spot in the Toronto Fringe Festival lottery, they built the play.

“We were completely self-funded over 7 months in the studio. It was a complete grassroots operation,” Ms. Lujan notes. 

They honed the premise, beats, and games, all the while concentrating on the key to its success: earning the audience’s trust. The show is all about the thin barrier between audience and performer. 

“The audience is as much a part of the show as we are,” Ms. Lujan notes. “We are asking, how do we bring them deeper into the work? How do we take a risk and see who’s willing to go a little further with us? If people aren’t, we recalibrate and make sure everyone is having a good time.” 

MONKS has a loose structure by design. An hour long, the actual script is only ten pages. The open-endedness means no two performances are alike. Some fans have seen as many as five different iterations. 

“One night there was a priest in our audience who gave us his rosary. People bring stuffed animals,” Ms. Lujan noted. “We describe it as a cult following. People who want to participate will bring things. People will give us their cameras, their phones.”

This type of performance, both modern and historically influenced, brimming with possibility and risky humour, is drawing in a new generation of audiences who may not have had much exposure to theatre. 

“Right now, at least in theatre, there’s this desire for plays to be fun and funny,” Ms. Lujan said. 

“For me, stupidity is the most accessible form of comedy. We all have that as humans.” 

Stupid doesn’t mean MONKS isn’t deeply considerwed. It’s a long-held truism that actors have to have smarts to play dumb. 

“There’s this duality to monks, where they live this monastic life where they don’t really do much and they just enjoy the land and do nothing together, and there’s this other side of them that you see a lot in paintings where they’re making beer and they’re really gregarious and silly and rosy-cheeked.”

“The fun thing about clown is it’s all about disruption,” says Ms. Lujan. 

“We create a world with a lot of rules so that there’s a lot of rules to break and a lot of fun to be had with breaking those rules.”  

MONKS is on at the Red Barn at the Eddie on July 12th and 13th, at 2:30 and 7:30pm.