A one-person show of The Silence of the Lambs sounds likeliest to be a spoof.

And while Goodbye Horses: An Unauthorized Retelling of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs attempts to elicit more laughter than the titular movie, Michael Kinnan’s adaptation opts for John Early’s approach in Maddie’s Secret, a subtler dialing up than the customary tonal extremity of parody. Instead of ratcheted-up over-the-top, Goodbye Horses only slightly turns up the movie’s existing eccentricities, usually to highlight its drag diva elements (…in a twisted story about a man “dressing up” as women, perhaps the reason the title connects to this reading’s most overt and explicit scene). 

Guffaws also come from the theatrical ingenuity of solo staging a blockbuster on a shoestring budget, in the vein of Recent Cutbacks. And like that company, the nature of Goodbye Horses’ spoofery ultimately acts as an ode to the mastery of The Silence of the Lambs. Even with the silly alterations, the movie’s genius still shines through. The fact that the writing and the directing and the acting still resonate, despite the silliness…

And the fact that the material even can be translated into silliness, while still working!