The history of passports, smuggling Kentucky Fried Chicken into other countries and the peculiarities of airline security — it’s all covered in this dazzling and funny one-man saga that unpacks how the mundane details that govern global travel become the actual journey.

17 Border Crossings is a surreal sojourn that transports us to very real places: Hungary, Serbia, Morocco, Colombia, Holland and Mexico, to name a few. In the deft, mischievous manner of the trickster, Phillips manages to float huge questions that surround the fraught migrations of our era.

With all the childlike curiosity and adult skepticism of monologist Spalding Gray, and the theatrical wizardry of a Robert Lepage, Thaddeus Phillips takes audiences by the hand on a trip around the world and shows us that when we cross the imaginary lines that divide up the world, the real borders come to light.

“Dazzling! Phillips is a fluid, shifting storyteller, something of a conjuror. Technically brilliant, dizzyingly so. Each episode is beautifully rendered, an act of transportation.” - The Stage (UK)