We were pretty torn up when Daniel Kitson abruptly canceled his Resonance.FM morning radio show, A Reason to Wake Up. His musings had become a bright spot in this pandemic mess. But as it turns out, the British comedian has not forsaken us. The raconteur re-emerged the other day with a new proposition; to hold screenings of his famed one-man story show The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church. These screenings simulate an actual performance, involve three time zones (AEST, BST, EDT), and have limited audience capacity. Read on for more details on how you can score tickets to these precious screening events that launch today.

Kitson first performed The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church at the Edinburgh Festival in 2009. It begins with the storyteller recounting how he came upon a large stash of letters in an attic while house hunting. These notes turn out to be the correspondence of a man named Gregory Church. Of the show, Kitson explains, “It was deceptively simple but satisfyingly complicated, it was funny and sad, there was a bit of mystery in it and, I thought, when I did it right, it was quite exhilarating.”

In 2011, Kitson took the show on the road. He performed it at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn as part of the Under the Radar Festival, and then traveled with it to Melbourne and around the UK. On May 11, 2011, Chris Evans went to the Tobacco Factory Theatre in Bristol, England, and recorded a performance in the round with eight cameras.

Nine years in the making, The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church – the Movie is finally ready for its premiere. Kitson is using his tour of the show as a guide for its streaming rollout. Since he performed the show in the UK, Melbourne, and New York, he will host screenings catered to these time zones. Monday, May 18 through Friday, May 22, there will be daily screenings, one at 9pm AEST, one at 9pm BST, and one at 9pm EDT. And on Saturday, May 23 and Sunday, May 24, there will be screenings at 11am AEST, 11am BST, and 11am EDT. The capacity of the three venues at the time he performed the show will dictate how many tickets he will sell. These shake out as follows:

The Tobacco Factory Theatre in Bristol, England – 356 seats
The Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre in Melbourne – 376 seats
St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York – 200 seats

Initially, Kitson put tickets to the screenings on sale last Friday, but the ticketing system crashed. In a note to fans, he chalked it up to underestimating “the scale and voracity of the DK2000 marketplace™.” After some re-tooling, tickets go back on sale today at 9am in each screenings respective time zone. As of press time, the UK time zone screenings are practically sold out. In the U.S., best bets are the Monday through Friday screenings for the folks in Melbourne at 7am EDT/4am PDT, or the New York time zone screenings at 9pm EDT/6pm PDT, and the weekend screenings for Melbourne at 9pm EDT/6pm PDT (Friday and Saturday), or the New York time zone screenings at 11am EDT/8am PDT (Saturday and Sunday). As you can see, it can get confusing.

Tickets to the screenings run £5 (or local equivalent) with all proceeds going to The Angel Comedy Micro Bursary Fund, an initiative that supports comedians who lost work because of the coronavirus lockdown. You can purchase your tickets here via Citizen Ticket on Monday, May 18, starting at 9am in the AEST, BST, and EDT time zones. Kitson will introduce the screenings. We assume these intros are pre-recorded. Update: The introductions are live and he also speaks briefly at the end, so don’t turn the stream off prematurely.

As for his last outing as a breakfast radio DJ, you can read more about that here.

Photo credit: Pavel Antonov