Star Of Hit TV Show 'Madam' Premieres New Play At Auckland Fringe

A nostalgic journey through the era of Britney Spears, cellphones that looked like small bricks and jeans that only look good on a person with the lower torso of a 12 year old boy, Me, My Mother and Suzy Cato is a tale of past demons, future hopes, and the universal struggle of the family we need versus the family we get.

It's December 1999, and the one thing helping 17-year-old Rachel avoid the fact she's terrified about her future is the promise of ringing in the year 2000 on a beach with her friends/love interest. So when her mother insists she greet Y2K in an apocalypse bunker her father’s built in their front garden, Rachel seeks counsel from the only rational adult she can think of, beloved children’s entertainer Suzy Cato.

This darkly goofy one-woman show is written and performed by Kiwi/elder millennial Florence Hartigan, who when she’s not fretting about the apocalypse, can be seen acting alongside Rachel Griffiths in the TV comedy ‘Madam’, which was awarded Best New Creation at the 2024 Monte-Carlo Television Festival, and Best Comedy at the 2024 Berlin International Television Festival. Florence also starred in the US feature film Phoenix Forgotten, which was produced by Ridley Scott and the animated horror film To Your Last Death, alongside William Shatner.

The inspiration to make Me, My Mother and Suzy Cato came from an experience in Florence’s own childhood. Although they didn’t build a bunker, Florence’s parents decided to move their young family from Ireland to New Zealand after the Chernobyl disaster in the late 80s, worried about another nuclear explosion in Europe (a threat that seemed to bother precisely no-one else).

“My parents were both really anxious people when we were growing up. We were the kids who weren’t allowed to eat beef when people started talking about mad cow disease. There was a period when I wasn’t allowed to lace my shoelaces up all the way because my dad was worried it would weaken my ankles. It came from this loving place of trying to protect us, but there comes a point where you realise families have their own logic - and you get to choose whether or not that’s yours as well.”

In a time where we need connection more than ever, Me, My Mother and Suzy Cato offers a chance to share, commiserate, laugh and and look back fondly on an era that shaped/damaged/grew a generation. As a teenage girl in the early 2000s, the future promised to us seemed both exciting and potentially lethal. It was the new millennium, but also potentially the end of the world. The message was “Go girl!” but the subtext was one wrong move and you’d be taken down.

As the Y2K era comes back with a vengeance in today’s pop culture Me, My Mother and Suzy Cato invites the audience into a world which is simultaneously nostalgic and current. It creates a space where we can come together and find a piece of ourselves reflected back to us - and be thoroughly entertained in the process.

ME, MY MOTHER & SUZY CATO

Dates: Tue 10 - Sat 14 September 2024

Times: 7pm, 55mins

Venue: Tiny Theatre, Garnet Station

Tickets: $15-$24

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