Kerri Van Auken and James Scarborough Talk About Her Solo-Show ‘Blackout – No Hard Feelings’

Now Playing at Hollywood Fringe 2025 

Interview published with permission. To read the full article go to James Scarborough’s Art Magazine What the Butler Saw.

In “Blackout – No Hard Feelings,” Kerri Van Auken crafts a darkly comic journey into the mind of Mary Lynn, a woman whose sunny disposition masks a life in free fall. Van Auken’s one-woman show deftly navigates the troubles of middle-aged disappointment with humor and psychological depth.

This production stands out for its fresh take on emotional avoidance. Rather than merely depicting escapism, Van Auken takes us inside her protagonist’s head, creating a psychological landscape populated by personified emotions and coping mechanisms. The result feels both fantastical and uncomfortably familiar – a theatrical head trip that shows how we all compartmentalize uncomfortable truths.

Jessica Lynn Johnson directs this surreal exploration of adult arrested development, taking it beyond mere character study. The premise – a woman confronting the feelings she has spent a lifetime “blacking out” – could easily become either melodramatic or frivolous, but Van Auken’s background in comedy suggests she’ll handle this terrain with a touch that honors both the humor and humanity of her subject.

“Blackout” arrives when conversations about emotional intelligence and mental health are mainstream, making this exploration of one woman’s psychological journey both timely and insightful.

Below follows an email conversation with Kerri Van Auken.

JS: Your show features a protagonist who uses escapism as a coping mechanism. How did you develop Mary Lynn’s character? To what extent does her journey reflect common patterns of avoidance you’ve observed?

KVA:  Mary Lynn is a version of myself. I was always playing pretend and daydreaming. I was hopelessly boy crazy and occasionally ‘obsessed’ with things. Feeling physical feelings made me sick. Throw in a robust relationship with alcohol and a divorce that left me living like I was in my 20s but with a worse apartment- there was not much I didn’t want to avoid.

JS: The play creates a literal internal landscape where various aspects of the psyche become characters. Could you talk about how you personified these emotions, and how director Jessica Lynn Johnson helped shape them?

KVA: Personifying emotions comes very easy to me. Articulating and processing emotions does not. Jessica Lynn Johnson has an extraordinarily keen sense of what I’m trying to get across. She helps extrapolate themes and plot points, character nuances, and otherwise translate my wacky business, always mindful of the project as a whole. She helped shape my silly instincts into fully realized, captivating ‘people’.

JS: Your background spans multiple comedy disciplines – sketch, improv, stand-up. How have these different forms influenced your solo performance, particularly when tackling darker emotional terrain?

To read the full interview by James Scarborough with online Art Magazine, What the Butler Saw.