The Big Secret
Written and Performed by Brad Lawrence
Presented by FRIGID New York
UNDER St Marks Theater at 94 St Marks Pl New York, NY 10009
February 16-27, 2025
To be a voice for the voiceless is a responsibility few are boldly willing to take. Writer and performer Brad Lawrence does just that. His original debut was to a sold out show at Gotham in 2023 and now Brad Lawrence’s triumphant return of The Big Secret presented by FRIGID New York is layered with new heart wrenching stories with an updated ending. The Big Secret is a reflection on how a friendship in highschool has an influence that spans decades long on Lawrence. The show is all about how he manages the weight of keeping a lifelong secret that leads to a less than welcoming outcome for the fate of his beloved friend. Lawrence prepares us on a storytelling regalia of the stark contrast of life in 1980s America meeting the confines of ecclesiastical insubordination in the most dubious and unpredictable way.
Brad Lawrence is not only a skilled raconteur but the first person to be a back-to-back winner of Moth GrandSLAMS. In his witty, hyper-focused and candid way, Lawrence keeps you laughing, smiling, engaged and always contemplative. There are moments where he pauses to look right at the audience to embrace quiet moments riddled in thought and mystery where as an audience you can collectively gasp, aww and ooh at the intimacy in his approach. Lawrence displays impenetrable confidence in his telling of a story in that of a character that seemingly lacks confidence, it is almost as if in his nuances and gestures, Lawrence knows what we as an audience are really feeling and thinking.
There is a cool confidence in his demeanor as he gently whisks you away back to 1986 when he was a mere mullet wearing, dorky teen facing an existential crisis path in choosing relation to self and a higher power. In a moment so many of us can dreadfully relate, we experience a sermon by his pastor reminding us all of how love, sex and passion are for sinners who never plan on entering the pearly gates of heaven, how even the mere thought of lust and sex is enough to cast you off to h-e-double toothpicks. As some of us in the audience can relate to the fear and dread of times where we were told we might be veered off into the fiery gates of hell if we choose to not accept a “holy path”, we as an audience collectively erupt into a roaring laughter. Lawrence somehow masterfully creates a camaraderie for all of us to laugh and feel anger or rage together. He does all this through his use of skillfully woven storytelling, clever use of words, a streamlined approach that seemingly takes us inside his mind as a young impressionable boy who now needs to navigate his adolescence through purity of thought and action.
Lawrence recounts his impoverished upbringing and particularly his relationship with his older stepbrother seethingly trying to crawl under his evangelical skin with blasphemous thoughts that make him confront his commitment to his faith. The journey leads us all to his profound love and admiration for one of the girls in his youth group, Jessica, who unbeknownst to him at the time leads him on a friendship to fulfill his melancholy as the true misfit in school he feels he is. He is then confronted with her big secret that stretches his entire life as he comes across discovering the reason for her untimely death. The Big Secret is really the big question that perplexes us all in life, does keeping a secret ultimately affect another person's fate? If you had known that a secret could potentially change the course of someone’s life otherwise, would you have revealed their secret? Does gatekeeping a secret somehow make you sort of a master of another person’s destiny? These are all the questions Lawrence keeps us riddling throughout.
Review by Bianca Lopez.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on March 1st, 2025. All rights reserved.