VICTORIAN POETRY SLAM CHAMPION NEEDS TO SPEAK TO THE MANAGER. UNFORTUNATELY, IT’S HER.
Dayna Fallon’s husband is having a seizure on the bathroom floor. In the next room, her three daughters have unzipped a beanbag across the living room. On her laptop, a 7am Teams meeting wants to know if now is still a good time.
So she does what she always does. She manages the emergency, manages everyone else’s feelings, and schedules her own collapse for a more convenient time.
The Manager Is Me is a 55-minute solo collision of comedy, spoken word and theatre about the impossible job of holding everything together, and the woman discovering she is, somehow, the only person rostered on.
It marks the debut solo theatre work from writer-performer Dayna Fallon, 2025 Victorian State Champion of the Australian Poetry Slam and National Finalist at the Sydney Opera House.
Her blood type is CBF. Her sex life is on Afterpay. She is an accountant, a cook, an unlicensed paediatrician, a household hostage negotiator and a goddamn magician and still the only person in the house who knows where anything is, what everyone needs, and when it’s due. Everyone except herself.
It is a show for anyone who has ever typed “haha all good x” while their life was coming apart in real time.
Built from the slam poems that made Fallon’s reputation, the show stages one impossible morning that refuses to stop happening to her. She wrote it after years of running a house at maximum capacity, caring for a husband with complex health needs, and still feeling like she was falling apart, until the absurdity deserved a witness rather than an apology.
“I wrote this because I’ve made my children laugh to cover the sound of my husband’s seizures,” Fallon says. “I’ve lived the truth of ‘if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry’ and I started wondering how many women are doing that kind of emotional labour in silence.
The Manager Is Me is Directed by Green Room Award winner Cathy Hunt.
For audiences drawn to the sharp humour of Fleabag and the fury of Paris Paloma’s Labour, The Manager Is Me is funny first, until suddenly it isn’t, a brutal, brilliant solo work about invisible labour, survival humour and the women who make the impossible look manageable.
THE MANAGER IS ME
Venue: The Motley Wherehaus. The Salon, as part of Melbourne Fringe 2026
Performances:
Thu 8 October: 6pm
Fri 9 October: 6pm
Sat 10 October: 6pm
Thu 15 October: 6pm
Fri 16 October: 6pm
Sat 17 October: 3pm & 6pm
Running time: 55 minutes (no interval)
Tickets: Full $35 / Concession $28
To book: https://www.themanagerisme.com/
