In 2021, comedian and International Emmy Award winning television personality Josh Thomas revealed his autism diagnosis on Instagram. Three years later, in collaboration with American-Australian playwright Lally Katz, Thomas’ Let’s Tidy Up is a nakedly truthful exploration of the invisible barriers that he faces and his journey towards accepting them as part of his identity.
The Vagabond stage for Josh Thomas’ Let’s Tidy Up is furnished with a pair of antique chairs, a broom, and the floor is strewn with red and white rose-petal shaped confetti. The confetti represents Josh’s accumulated clutter: impulse online purchases, Instagram advertised devices, those extra buttons that come with pants that he doesn’t quite know what to do with. Throughout his hour long set, he intermittently returns to talking about the tidying up, but he never does it: the show ends with the stage as messy as it begins. It is a powerful visual representation of the executive functioning challenges that neurodiverse people can face, particularly when autism co-occurs with ADHD, as it often does, including with Josh.
Tidying up can seem like climbing Everest to Josh because all day he is navigating other challenges: small talk (is he asking enough questions), trying to not say everything that he thinks, navigating making friends and finding love and all the rules that come with this that are written in invisible facial micro-expressions. Josh explains how he moved to LA as an attempt to force himself to “fix” his shortcomings: as though it was a sink or swim scenario; that he was just not trying hard enough.
After an hour of revealing a litany of public humiliations, and a devastating loss, Josh concludes that self-improvement is a sham; that nobody really changes, and we should accept that we are all flawed, but still worthy of love, because everyone else is flawed too. This is potentially an overgeneralisation: the nuance of changing the things we can and accepting the things we can’t is missing. Regardless, this merger of stand-up and theatre, with deft use of lighting, music and even a dance break, is an important and entertaining snapshot into an exceptionally talented creative force’s inward contemplation of self. A contemplation that will help thousands who are walking the same path as him.
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