Keeping Up With The Jorgensons at Nugget Fringe Theater Festival

Adolescent angst, oddball family members, foot rubs, and late 20th century America all collide in Keeping Up With The Jorgensons, Jeremy Julian Greco’s bristling, humorous, sometimes sadly tender monologue coming to Grass Valley’s Nugget Fringe Theater Festival. It is the kind of piece that sucks you in, and then makes you cringe and laugh.

Directed by Mark Kenward, Keeping Up With The Jorgensons takes its audience back to 1982, when 10-year-old Jeremy was taken on a road trip to Orange County to attend the wedding of a relative he’d never met. If he behaves, he is promised a trip to Disneyland. We never find out if little Jeremy gets to go to “the happiest place on earth.” Because it’s the journey that counts.

Keeping Up with the Jorgensons will be presented at 8 pm on Friday, January 26th and 2 pm on Saturday, January 27th at the Off Center Stage, located at the Center for the Arts, Venue 6th, 315 South Richardson St. in Grass Valley. The show runs 60 minutes.

Jeremy Julian Greco is a San Francisco-based actor, director and writer who recently performed excerpts of Keeping Up with the Jorgensons at The Marsh and the Yes to Everything Festival in San Francisco. The full show premiered at the 2017 San Francisco Fringe Festival, where it won Best of the Fringe and received an appreciative review in the Huffington Post.

Greco’s first solo show, With Held, was based on the life of the artist and writer John Held Jr. Greco performed it at the Rogue Festival in Fresno and the Marin Fringe Festival, where Greco won a Critics’ Circle Best Actor Award. He also received a rave review in the Huffington Post following a well received performance at the San Francisco Fringe Festival.

Keeping Up With The Jorgensons is not to be missed; it is a roller coaster ride of memory. And Greco is excellent in this raucous coming to terms with the past.

The Nugget Fringe Festival, one of the region’s largest indoor arts events, is an un-curated collection of eclectic theater, dance, music, comedy, and spoken word. This year’s festival includes over a hundred performers from Nevada County and elsewhere around Northern California, presenting upwards of thirty-five distinct shows, comprising more than one hundred and eighteen performances over ten days. More information at www.nuggetfringe.com.