'Children First!' a few too many beers second...

Veering from charming to edgy, Children First! is a masterfully acted romp into the dark side of the imagination with six veteran Yale comedians. Written and directed by Bradley Bazzle, CC '02, the hour and a half long show probes deeper into the eccentricities of the mind than your average sketch comedy show.

REBECCA ROSENTHAL/YH Yeah... we don't know what to say either

The show begins as Ehren Park, ES '01, a suit-and-tie wearing school administrator type, gives the basic safety schpiel, but with better than average delivery. Introducing Bazzle and Ian Cheney, BK '02, as high five-giving, short shorts-wearing health and safety chearleaders on roller-skates, the show exudes a goofy but slightly demented air as the two actors parade the evils of booze, nicotine, and masturbation. The rest of the cast finds their way onto the stage by the next scene, as businessman Jill Cohen, JE '03, pitches unlikely ad campaign commercials, played with alacrity by Jeff Miller, MC '03, to unreceptive customers Adam Wells, CC '02, and Park.

The show is punctuated with dark humor. A cap gun is perhaps the most commonly used prop in the play. At least five skits involve murder, either explicit or implied, two discuss violent car crashes, and one has an especially disturbing incident of rape. Family scenes that would be sweet—Cheney perched on a car seat, posed as a young boy chirping "I'm small"—are soured by violence. Because the boy is so small, we soon are told it would not take him very many beers to total a Benz. The most frightening thing of all is that I found that bit hilarious.

Adding to the dark quality is a manic sense of dementia that pervades the show. Set in the present in ordinary places, almost every scene is bathed in a particular character's oddities. Stuffing a pen down his shirt, Park, as a smooth talking politician, seems to think he has shoved it down his cell wall. Sporting amorphous East European accents, Doctors Cat and Dog slip in and out of bestiality. And were it not for kind epithets muttered over the smoking body of John Brown, we would not know whether to think he was a freedom fighter or just a madman.

Perhaps the most successful part of the combination of Bazzle's script and the intimate cast size is how it allows each comedian to shine. Understated comic genius Wells shines as an inarticulate drunk who gives new meaning to the term bloody mary. Park does a fantastic job as a Bob Dole-meets-Bill Clinton politician who loses his grasp on reality, claiming to be not a human but rather a crafty one-celled organism. Here, however, the well-timed questions from Cohen, Miller, and Wells make the scene.

Cheney handles all his parts well but does best as ill-timed and overzealous freedom-fighter John Brown. Bazzle's intense delivery of some darker sketches leaves him slightly on the scary side of funny, however, and it requires the ample comic skill of Miller to make the most of a scene where he is showcased in a performance-artsy piece, without a single actual line. Unfortunately for the audience, Cohen is denied the comic center stage despite proving capable as an ensemble member with a strong range of verbal inflection.

The props are sparse but adequate to the task, and the costumes convey the relationships of the characters within each scene, with a few disshevelled wigs thrown in. The staging, however, is frustrating, as two sets of double doors constantly slam throughout the show. Only once, in the brilliant St. Peter sketch, are the doors capitalized upon as Peter, Park, and his angel cohort, Miller at his best, get in trouble with God for abusing the screening process.

Ultimately, Children First! is an entertaining show, except possibly for the more squeamish members of the audience, with a strong ensemble cast, good pacing, and more jarring humor than your average comedy show. Besides, who could pass up a dead gorilla and a large black dildo-shaped bong?

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