'Free Range Thinking' At Act II Through Sunday

Are you easily offended? If the answer is yes, than you might want to stay away from “Free Range Thinking.” Or, you can go to challenge your beliefs and laugh at yourself and our culture.

Robert Dubac’s “Free Range Thinking” drew laughs from an almost sold-out crowd during his first workshop performance at the Act II Playhouse Sunday night.  Dubac’s show operates under the premise of a storyline about a man who loses his memory and has to try to create his own beliefs without knowing what he has been told before.

The plot line doesn’t follow through the whole show very well, but it doesn’t take away from the performance at all. The laughs started at the very beginning during Dubac’s announcements to turn off phones and kept going until his finale: wiggling his ears with rolled papers sticking out of them in time with music.

Dubac stood in front of the audience on simple stage using a chalkboard as his main prop. As the only performer, Dubac played all of the roles, which included himself, Uncle Bobby, a child and a Harvard-educated hillbilly – each offering a piece of wisdom to help Dubac discover “the bigger picture.”

He begins by standing in a box, explaining how he lost his memory and his new quest to find the truth. Dubac finds a fortune cookie in his wallet that tells him to think outside of the box. When Dubac steps outside of the box and asks a question or speaks a piece of truth, the stage lit up to signal the enlightenment.

Dubac receives a call from “the voice of reason” and is given the option to upgrade to a higher thought process by going through the door of truth to see the bigger picture.

To see the bigger picture, Dubac has to erase everything he knows about religion, race, sex, politics and the media. He demonstrates this by symbolically erasing those words, written on the chalkboard, to reveal the word “truth.”

While Dubac’s purpose was to enlighten the audience and make everyone think a little harder about his or her beliefs, he balanced his heavy reflections with humor. As he walked through the door of truth, it hit him on head because “the truth hurts.”

Dubac also made fun of everyone throughout the show – Republicans, Democrats, the media, politicians and even the audience.

He even incorporated magic tricks into his program. At one point, Dubac appears to tear up a newspaper but in the end, shows that it is in fact still whole. This puts an image to his concept of differentiating between truth and illusion.

In the end, Dubac said that the bigger picture is “us.” As he spun a mirror to face the audience, his big piece of enlightenment was to say that there is no “us versus them,” it’s always “us versus us.”

The show garnered not only laughs from the audience but also a couple thousand dollars for the ACT II Playhouse.

Dubac will be presenting another workshop performance of “Free Range Thinking” Sunday, July 24 at 7 p.m.