Jessica Lynn Johnson

“The show is hilarious! But the theme, it’s quite serious.”
Fox 5 News/Toni Senecal

“Johnson skillfully plays 10 characters, perfectly capturing them all, from a porn star to a womanizer on Elimidate.”
The Village Voice

“More oohs and ahhs at this year’s Fringe Festival than baby Suri in Vanity Fair. Oblivious To Everyone manages to make you laugh out loud when you probably should be crying.”
NY Press

“Expertly played by Jessica Lynn Johnson. As Johnson smoothly transitions from one character to the next, her remarkable ability shines. An excellent one-woman show about the power of the media.”
Back Stage

“Features more fully-realized characters than a half-dozen other Off-Broadway shows.”
HX Magazine

“Written and performed by Jessica Lynn Johnson, this highly entertaining solo show examines the influence of the media on body image, sexual identity, and gender construction. Johnson inhabits the characters fully, demonstrating her versatility as a performer as well as her keen sense of comic timing and delivery. This show is definitely worth seeing.”
Theater Mania

“Johnson creates Carrie, a self-anointed “smut-a-holic” far more multi-faceted than the “Simple Life” star professes to be. The Louis Vuitton purse-toting Carrie is alternately sad, vulnerable and finally reflective. Oh yeah, and she’s funny, too…Johnson is delightful.”
Staten Island Advance

“A funny new solo show written and performed by Jessica Lynn Johnson. The show features a bravura performance by Johnson that ranks as the best surprise of this year’s Fringe Festival. Johnson’s transformation into each of the show’s nearly ten characters is downright impressive, switching personalities as fast as one can flip channels. She never misses a beat, performing one seamless metamorphosis after another with jaw-dropping facility. The talented Johnson has crafted a flattering vehicle for herself, as both an actor and a writer, that is definitely worth checking out.”
NYTheatre.com

“Playing a total of ten different characters, Johnson is able to mold her body and face to each and switch between them within seconds. She shows admirable capability in using her body as a fluid and convincing prop. Johnson is good at getting the laughs from the audience.”
Broadway.com

“Highly entertaining. Ms. Johnson’s talent shows through in all the recreations. As she struggles to make sense of and at times justify her media-made self, Carrie becomes a poignant victim of the aggressive campaign of perfection that is the new American recipe for happiness.”
NYCOnStage.org

“This was a virtuoso performance of the highest order, in which she showed herself to be a consummate master of characterization, movement, and an encyclopedia of various American accents. “
The Bershire Review For the Arts
- Fox 5 News, Various

Women On The Edge: Astoria’s Addition To Fringe
by Carol Forget

Jessica Lynn Johnson leads a frenetic comic exploration of media’s influence on female identity in “Oblivious to Everyone,” one of nine Queens based performances at this year’s Fringe Festival.

If the recent power outage and unrelenting heat have unraveled your sanity, take comfort in two plays spotlighting unbalanced women written and acted by Astoria residents. They’re only a nibble from the feast of emerging and innovating talent featured at this year’s New York International Fringe Festival.
From psychological drama to a fast paced one woman comedy, playwright/performer Jessica Lynn Johnson's “Oblivious to Everyone” (Love Creek Productions), speaks through Carrie, a Paris Hilton in training, to show the media's portrayal of women and its influence on their identity.
Carrie is a TV talk show addict, clicking through a line up of male and female characters: Botox Beauty, Elimidate Pervert, Springer Trailer Trash—10 in all—as if responding to a remote control. “Growing up I always watched a ton of TV,” said Johnson, 24, who moved from St. Charles, Mo. to Queens a year ago. At Missouri State University, she studied, among other things, dialects, though she's always done voices and characters. Sometimes she would wind and rewind a tape of “The Ricki Lake Show” to practice mimicking a guest.
Leave the kids at home for this one. “It's a comedy, but definitely a dark comedy,” said Johnson of her first play, which began as a minute and a half long monologue. The current 75 minute version has twice as many characters and was honed by relentless workshopping. Adult themes such as eating disorders, body image issues and sexuality abound.
The play's director, Christopher Sorensen, has a link to the first FringeNYC. In 1996, he was an original member of the Present Company, a fledgling off off Broadway ensemble, with a role in Brian Parks' “Americana Absurdum.” While preparing to take that production to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, the company's artistic director, John Clancy, questioned the wisdom of traveling to Scotland to gain recognition back home. Why not establish a festival in New York? The rest is theater history.
Originating with a small core group, this is the Present Company's 10th year of producing FringeNYC, which features emerging talent and innovative, experimental plays and performances. Nine Queens based entries are among the more than 200 national and international offerings that will be hitting 20 downtown Manhattan stages Aug. 11 through 27.
For the complete schedule and tickets, visit www.fringenyc.org or call (212) 279 4488.


- Queens Chronicle