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O'Callahan: A major experience
By Penny Waddell
Hawkes Bay Herald Tribune, New Zealand
(Excerpts) It is inadequate to categorise Jay O'Callahan as simply a storyteller. As his one-man show, Points of View, made clear, he is not so much a narrator of tales as a major experience.
His programme at the Comedy Playhouse last night was certainly far from the lighthearted tale-telling that I was expecting - as far as he himself was from a facile narrator. The urgency of his speech, the acting out of his characters, the appropriate accents and vocal sound effects, the unexpected comic touches, were part of a fascinating and very telling programme indeed.
Mr. O'Callahan achieved the almost impossible in the way of audience concentration.
The real meat of the evening was the telling, in the first person, of Richard Wheeler's journey of four months in a kayak, as he followed the path of the now extinct Great Auk (The Spirit of the Great Auk). He had the gift of making the scenes and events he described graphically real and personal, and always spiced with the unexpected, not to mention danger - so that the listener had the sensation of suffering with the teller...his account of the deliberate extinction of the Great Auk and the dangers of over-fishing were both dramatic and most uncomfortably convincing.
Mr. O'Callahan, I believe, came to Hastings from an annual Storytellers' Festival in Masterton. He must have been a major drawcard there: certainly the full house at the Playhouse spoke for itself. It is a pity that it was a one-night stand only.
Hawkes Bay Herald Tribune, New Zealand
October 24, 1997