Review: It’s Not "The Big Secret" That This Is a Great Show

The Big Secret

Written and performed by Brad Lawrence

Presented by FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks

94 St Marks Pl, Manhattan, NYC

February 16-27, 2025

With an updated version of 2023's The Big Secret, storyteller Brad Lawrence returns to UNDER St Marks with another outstanding solo performance. Hilarious and moving, Lawrence takes us through what ultimately becomes a decade-spanning consideration of and tribute to a formative friendship. At the same time, Lawrence's looking back over this particular relationship acts as a meditation on and exhortation to resist the ways that institutions, including church, patriarchy, and family, can damagingly distort both people's selves and their stories.

While The Big Secret does eventually end up in the recent past, most of the show focuses on a few pivotal years beginning when Lawrence was 14. Through an anecdote about a youth group event at which the youth pastor preached against the horrors of premarital sex–teen pregnancy, AIDS, drug addiction, and, of course, abortion–we are introduced to Lawrence's friend Jessica. Since the kids in the youth group are from different schools, it offers them a chance to try on different identities, personas, and social positions, and Lawrence's organically evolving friendship with the confident, charismatic, and slightly older young woman is something that, he notes, would never have happened amongst his peers at school. He in fact describes both his school and home lives as lonely and scary, the latter involving a fractured household burdened by economic pressures, loss, and the exploding meth epidemic. The arrival of Lawrence's adult step-brother Jeff back at the family home emerges as an important narrative strand and experience that turns out to completely upend and reframe Lawrence's perceptions of what is important. Guilt, whether justified or not, is one thing that unites these stories and–along with a recent Supreme Court decision–catalyzes the show's questioning of how someone like Jessica was made to see herself and how that affected the path that her life took.

Although the show begins with Lawrence talking about when he will talk about the titular secret, one could really see the title as alluding to multiple secrets, especially if one draws a partial parallel between Jessica and Jeff as people whose struggles to stay on or find the 'right' path may have been hidden to most. The show also affectingly presses the audience to think about our relationship to the deaths of others and the ways in which we individually and communally (mis)remember the deceased and their stories. Lawrence brings a rich, vivid life to the people, places, and conversations that he recounts, masterfully controlling the peaks and valleys of energy and emotion in the show. The Big Secret asks audiences to help remember its central subject, and given its own memorability, that should not be a problem.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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