It's Dada night at the Yale Children's Theater

By Ann Ritter

When your head's made of cheese, you can't really help but be weird. As one might imagine, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, currently running at the Yale Children's Theater, is truly an exercise in the surreal. While most children's stories make at least a moderate attempt to create a coherent plot with some sort of moral lesson attached, Stinky Cheese Man refuses to water down its manic nonsense with any boring old realism.

The play, presented under the guise of a schmaltzy variety show, is more a series of bizarre vignettes than a unified story. Hosted by Jack (of the Jack and the Beanstalk fairy tale, played by John Richter, TC '00), the show retells many traditional fairy tales in a style so fast-paced that even a four-year-old with Attention Deficit Disorder wouldn't get bored.

The skit from which the production draws its title is unparalleled in its strangeness. A lonely old couple (played exceptionally by Andrew Drabkin, SM '01, and Cathleen Otero, SY '99) sit around their house looking for something to do. In need of new companionship, the old man decides to create a doll made out of some foul old cheese that he has lying around the kitchen. The Cheese Man springs to life and runs away, singing "Run, run, fast as you can/ can't catch me/ I'm the Stinky Cheese Man." In a series of bizarre, entertainingly unsettling conclusions, the Stinky Cheese Man winds up drowning in a river.

Another one of the central stories of the production, based on Jon Scieszka's The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, is especially creative. Director Heather Day, CC '99, does an inspired overall job with the surreal, but this piece is arranged in an especially successful way. As the Big Bad Wolf (Sam Carner, BR '01) relates his story from prison, the remaining actors pantomime a flashback scene explaining the wolf's justification for eating the little pigs. As it turns out, the wolf killed the pigs by accident. After he is arrested on charges of manslaughter, a pair of muckraking journalists sensationalize the story and vilify the wolf. Like everything else in the play, the sketch is completely unpredictable.

With its trademark creatively low-budget sets and costumes, the Children's Theater is a dramatic organization that has truly stayed in touch with its youthful roots. The actors, like most of us, began their lives getting dressed up in funny clothing and playing make-believe in their parents' basements. Stinky Cheese Man captures this goofy, imaginative feeling of childhood, helping to create an enormously enjoyable production.

While all of the group's actors excel at being weird, Isolde Krummrich, SM '01, and Drabkin turn in especially ridiculous performances. Krummrich's turn as an emphysemic, pathologically lying frog is hilarious, and Drabkin's portrayal of the Big Bad Wolf in the pantomime sequence captures all of the overplayed mischief one would expect from a Children's Theater villain.

When the only moral related over the course of a children's production is "It's all right to be lactose intolerant," you know that you're not dealing with an ordinary show. The play, while encouraging offbeat creativity, otherwise has little overt educational value. This observation, however, is far from a criticism. Because the actors are unburdened by even the smallest amount of seriousness, their performances are especially irreverent and completely lacking in self-consciousness.

This irreverence is particularly prevalent in the play's final scene. The production ends with an elaborate improv sequence, during which the audience is offered a chance to steer the actors. By the end, the scene included a security guard at Sterling Memorial Library, a decapitated head, a dismembered body, and a threat on Emily Pataki's, PC '01, life. Like the whole play, the improvisation made only minimal sense but somehow managed to be absolutely hilarious anyway.

In short, it doesn't get much more bizarre than this. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales is a good, energizing way to spend 45 minutes of your time. No matter what you expect, the play is guaranteed to deliver something entirely different. There are few plays at Yale about which one can say the same thing.

Go check out the Children's Theater so that you can abandon logic and revel in absurdity instead.

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