Karin Fekko

She sits on a tall stool with a microphone and talks so softly the room has to lean in. When she brings up brain lesions or losing feeling in her limbs, she does it with the dry shrug of someone recounting an annoying commute. There is no swelling dramatic music and no eager reach for applause breaks. She sets up a grim medical reality, lets the room get tense for three seconds, and then undercuts it with a small, embarrassing detail about trying to hide a numb foot on a first date.

She works mostly in the indie fringe circuit and black-box rooms in Toronto, sitting right on the fence where narrative solo theater meets standup. It is a space where plenty of performers tilt into self-serious therapy sessions, but Fekko protects the jokes.

Her hour, Multiple Neurosis, leans heavily on that contrast. The pacing is patient, sometimes risking a lull when she stays inside a story too long before hitting the release valve. She is not chasing rapid-fire punchlines. Instead, the laugh comes from the sheer absurdity of keeping multiple sclerosis secret for nearly two decades while dating deadbeats and trying to seem normal in office meetings.

Her training in Toronto sketch and improv keeps the stage presence relaxed, but the engine of the act is those seventeen years spent pretending nothing was wrong. By turning that denial into the joke, she avoids the trap of the sympathy show.