Floor food and the radical left

By H. Frederick Tang

Liz Oliner /YH This play is far more entertaining than your ordinary 'Dog & Pony Show.'

When you walk in, after rolling a dice to see how much you pay, they hand you a "menu"--a list of the thirty plays, with numbers next to them. And you shout out what you want to see. With titles like, "Full Frontal Neo-Futurist Nudity," "Faster Pussycat! Pill! Pill!," "Wanna Buy A Baby," and "Benjamin Lewinsky," how do you choose? At the preview I attended, they only let me choose five (with an encore of two). What a tease. It was like being at Pika Tapas, where you want to order everything but you have to pick and choose. At the actual performances, audiences will be much luckier. Chances are they'll get through most of them.

Among other things, the skits' quick pace, attention-grabbing content, audience participation, and autobiographical nature make the whole thing feel like an improv comedy show where you're on a first-name basis with the whole group: Megan (Campisi, DC '99), Max (Dana, BR '99), Claire (Lundberg, TC '98), Alexis (Soloski, BR '98), and Ben (Vershbow, BR '01). The writing, acting, and directing is all solid--with a cast like this, that almost goes without saying. This isn't the kind of show where you can write a long-winded analysis about how some of the skits make you recall Durang, Mamet, or Beckett, but I'll give a couple recommendations for "tapas" that you just have to try.

Megan gives a hilarious monologue in No. 27--"Destroying the Radical Left"--where she rants on the annoyance of being stereotyped as a feminist vegan lesbian. Maybe it's funny because we can sympathize, just as we can with #20--"The Saddest Conversation In The Whole Entire World (That I Had Five Times Today) Chorale"--a song made up of tidbits of superficial conversation. Some skits can be either sad or absurdly funny, depending on how sick you are: #21--"Meal of Fortune"--gives us Claire, tied up and eating candy off the floor of Nick Chapel. You just can't find entertainment like that from non-Neo-Futurists.

I'm not terribly familiar with Neo-Futurism, and the sound of the word `futurism' leaves me with foggy images of paintings of dogs running so fast that their legs blend together. But I'm told that Neo-Futurist Theater is the theater of reality. The time is now. The set is the stage. The characters are the actors. Nothing is hidden--no scripts, no dressing rooms, no backstage. What you see is what you get. And even if you roll a six and have to pay three bucks, then, at ten cents a skit, it's worth it.

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