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Alex Berr doesn’t want to be a scientist anymore. As a teen, she dreamed of curing brain cancer. Years later, while completing her PhD, her mom was diagnosed with the same cancer she had spent her youth studying. This work-in-progress show follows Alex’s highs and lows through her career in science– getting inducted into a scientific secret society! using sex to cope with grief! coming to terms with experimenting on mice! Alex weaves together her experience of her mom’s illness with dark, candid, and silly humor highlighting the complex intertwining of professional expertise and personal experience.

News and Reviews for this Show

August 23, 2024  The Wee Review At 11:30 in the morning, a charming Alex Berr is able to corral a nearly full room into rooting for her from the get go. Throughout 45 minutes of comedy that she’s still working through in her work-in-progress, ‘How to Kill a Mouse’, Berr chronicles her journey to a career in science. But behind a woman in STEM—a crowd work mechanism Berr uses to cheer on her fellow female scientists — Berr is also a daughter who lost her mother. As she reckons with her mother’s death and the fact that she couldn’t cure her mother’s rare form of cancer, despite coincidentally studying it from when she was 16 years old, she manages to make a room of early risers laugh in the process. Now, Berr is a glorified exterminator (of sorts), which she jokingly reminds us of through a hilarious act-out. Berr is still developing her debut hour and as she searches for the message of her show, despite its already strong underlying emotional core, there is potential for her to have an ironclad debut in 2025. The jokes are witty, but with more call-backs and full circles drawn in the show’s still-to-be-seen final 15 minutes, ‘How to Kill a Mouse’ could rise to a much greater height. Berr’s energy alone is infectious, more infectious than the lung cancer she injects into lab mice. (In all fairness, cancer is not technically infectious at all). What we mean to say, of course, is that Berr’s natural charm is a bright way to start any day, despite her dark subject matter. She lights up the room with her smile and naivete, and we just want the world to turn in her favor. She became a scientist to save millions of lives; perhaps she’ll save them with laughter instead. Click Here

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