Porn & Pinochet

Caturro Productions—Planetarium

This stand-up comic seems to struggle with the storytelling medium; his piece more closely resembles a comedy act in which the punchlines don’t quite stick their landing. The onstage set pieces that imply a more theatrical offering are under utilized, and the show fails to live up to the “funny as hell” promise of its program billing. Cañete’s narrative leans heavily into a perceived cultural difference in his Chilean-Canadian upbringing that elicited little more than polite chuckles from the audience.

His Gen X coming-of-age tale breezes past its most unique elements, which come long after the extended preamble to his return to Chile as a teenager. Somehow, relatively typical sexual discovery and family dysfunction take up far more space in a story titled ‘Pinochet’ than the fascinating reality of attending a fascist-supported grade school in dictatorial South America. This intriguing experience comes and goes in mere sentences and is followed by an emotional climax and conclusion that is not connected well enough to the previous acts to allow the audience to share in the performer’s complex feelings of losing a habitually problematic parent abroad.

Ashley Frantik