ANOTHER LOUSY DAY - The Bakery ARTRAGE Centre Until Feb 15^th

Occasionally, very occasionally, comes a piece of art that strikes you as beautiful, flawless, deftly handled and presented
with a sure feeling for the subject. David Kodeski's Another Lousy Day is such a piece. It would be insufficient to say that
Another Lousy Day is just the gradual revealing of one television factory worker's life. This "junk-store detective story"
is a fascinating journey through the processes of discovery and understanding. All the more powerful when the subject
of discovery is an American woman appearing first to Kodeski in pages of a personal diary found in a musty antique store.

The simple production starts off with a series of holiday slides taken in the 1950s. One beauty of Another Lousy Day
is that this production transcends time. The audience takes an interest in these unknown holidaymakers japing with
silly hats and showing off modest hauls of catfish.

Our emotional attachment comes with the introduction of Dolores, a television factory worker, wraith-like in her
own mostly-miserable diary entries. Kodeski employs a galloping metre in reading from Doloresπ diaries, lurching
into a litany of "lousys" - from maddening movies and mangled meals to the malaise of mysterious men characters.

Another beauty of Another Lousy Day is that it transcends time. We are pulled from technicolour times of
post WWII America to the here and now, listening breathless as the narrator/presenter expounds his glee
in finding diaries, scrapbooks, addresses: things that give body to this Dolores. He draws us into the past,
and then yanks us back into the present. Sometimes we are in both places; the simple device of a whiteboard
used to record Dolores' vital statistics keeps us abreast of the score.

Kodeski, as much as Dolores herself, keeps the audience glued: accounting the initial finding of Dolores 1960s
diaries (involving a delightful segue into his collection of books relating to his aversion to drinking tap water);
the luck in finding Dolores' Aladdin's Cave of scrapbooks, and his subsequent "show-and-tell" glee in flicking
through the contents; and the gradual "finding" of Dolores.

Another Lousy Day is sweetly layered like the most delicious cake. The production is a quirky and
celebratory take on the "biography" theatre genre, poignant and magical in the study of a person,
Dolores, susceptible to the same fallibilities - broken dreams, unrequited love, ruined meals, lousy days -
common to humanity.

-BradenHarris, Perth, WA