Review #3 of 3: The Making of a Great Moment, by Hyde Park Theatre
by Alistair C. Beaumont
The Victoria Canada Traveling Bicycle Theatre Company
Presents Great Moments in Human Achievement
by Alistair C. Beaumont
(as recorded by Brian Paul Scipione)
Mona Barnes and Terry Dean of the Victoria Canada Traveling Bicycle Theatre Company (VCTBTC) have rolled into Hyde Park Theatre and given a road-weary, blowout of a performance that included nearly five hundred of the most important great moments of human achievements in a mere four hours. The actors were, amazingly, not two-tired to give a geared-up performance that never hit the brakes and spoke to each individual audience member, helping them come to grip with life behind the bars without pedaling any bad puns on the ride.
You might remember Barnes as the two-time Vickie-nominated actress who emoted her way through classic hits like The Whore of Lake Charles, Why is the Flower Vase Empty, Patricia?, and Louise and Clara: A Feminist Retelling. Barnes’s dedication to her performance is overwhelming. She's acting as if her very life depends on it, feeding off the audience’s energy with a delightful combination of sycophancy and vampirism.
She's joined by Dean, whom you surely remember from one of his 407productions throughout upper North America. None comes to mind except this one. He was also heavily active on television, specializing in once-in-a-lifetime roles that happened, well, once in a lifetime. This production is no different. His naturalistic and suave ‘joie de vivre’ performance style has transcended to an urgent and panicked ‘joie de survivre.’ This is the first play he hastoured by bicycle.
Herein lies the unique (to the point of peculiar) aspect of The Making of Great Moments of Human Achievement. Audience members staggered out afterward, punch-drunk théâtrophiles, not quite sure wheher they watched a production or participated in it. To call this play 'ambitious 'would be like calling Napoleon geographically lazy. Somewhere around the 274th Great Moment, one begins to feel disincorporated from the very history one is watching. Mona’s accent work is somehow both grounding and outrageous while her physicality is endearing and frightening at the same time.
Some have suggested this duo is manifesting the classical theatrical trope of the fool and the zealot. That's fitting, for in each historical achievements depicted requires one individual to try something never before imagined (e.g., inventing clothing from a dead animal or creating religion to try to bring people closer together) and one to witness it. Their real-time reactions to one other’s performance are so authentic, so honest and vulnerable that one might even accuse them of indulging in occasional ad-libbing (n.b., I seriously doubt that this is their process). This duo is constantly engaged in a duet of building one other up after tearing one other down. Egads, the raw emotional exchanges would cause lesser artistes a never-ending stream of panic attacks!
Once in a lifetime one stumbles on a play like Peter Nachtrieb Sinn's The Making of Great Moments in Human Achievement, a play that forces one’s solitary perspective, by hook or by crook, into a universal perspective. One departs having experienced the epiphany that great achievements of the past are intimately bound to all of humankind's future achievements, and that these achievements may in time fade from our thoughts but never from our souls!
The fact that Barnes and Dean manage to bring this production to life after bicycling hundreds of kilometers between venues is in itself a momentous achievement. One can only imagine what philosophically deleterious effects life on the road has on these die-hard thespians. Someone should write it down. That would be a story indeed!
EXTRA
Click to view the Hyde Park Theatre program for The Making of a Great Moment
The Making of a Great Moment
by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb
Hyde Park Theatre
October 01 - October 24, 2026
(revised) October 1 - October 24, 2026
Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd at Guadalupe, Austin
