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The Mad Ones: No Commonplace Thing
Given their short history, it may be premature to talk about what exactly defines a performance as developed by the Brooklyn-based theatre outfit The Mad Ones. Having produced just two self-written plays at the Brick Theatre in Williamsburg, including last year’s Samuel and Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot Wars, as well as their latest piece, The Tremendous Tremendous, they are still relatively new to New York’s theatre scene. Already though, The Mad Ones have won several Independent Theatre Awards for their inaugural production and have developed a cult following of theatergoers looking for the unexpected. While narrative and aesthetic experimentation are clearly important to the ensemble, other themes are emerging as foci around which the company’s ideas revolve. More specifically, The Mad Ones seem most interested in exploring how performance and artifice can reveal quiet truths, and similarly, how vivid stories can be teased out of silences and ambiguities.
In their favorable reviews in Time Out New York and the Voice, The Mad Ones have been referred to as “steampunk” and “retro” and certainly their two productions balance the period and the ironic as implied by such terms. Their use of period is less about kitsch than it is about exploration and reinvention, however. In Samuel and Alasdair, Soviet radio performers find diversion and meaning in broadcasting their At-Home Field Guide (a sort of Siberian Home Companion), featuring old-fashioned American serials. Though set in an unspecified, post-apocalyptic time period, the play believably takes on a style suggestive of the 1950s without necessarily being bound to that period. The audience is always aware that the actors are performing the period. In fact, one of the joys of Samuel and Alasdair is in watching as the Russian characters transform into their “American” radio personas: Anastasia Volinski (Stephanie Thompson) deftly breaks from her clipped Siberian accent to sing lush and unaffected versions of Sam Cooke’s You Send Me and Patsy Cline’s She’s Got You. Dr. Mischa Romanov (Mark Bovino) and The Host (Joe Curnutte) pivot from discussing the devastating war that annihilated the entire North American continent to enacting a soda-pop-and-ice-cream-shop love story story set in the American heartland. Throughout the program, Alexei “Tumbleweed” Patrovya (Michael Dalto) plays honky tonk guitar, and the Host punctuates the radio drama with exuberant and corny sponsor advertisements (“sponsored in part by One World Union Oyster Crackers. Make a soup a little less soupy; find them in the cracker aisle at your neighborhood State grocer…”). Occasionally, something far more ominous than the threat of a broken heart interrupts the broadcast.
The Tremendous Tremendous also honors its respective time period without being necessarily confined to its rules. The play begins as The Tremendous Traveling Abbotts enter their dressing room to commemorate the closing night of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The play continues through the possible dissolution of the troupe an hour later. The euphoria of the great performance (“we killed tonight”), tempered only by the little regrets of imperfectly constructed jokes and forgotten props (we learn that a shoe served as a substitute sword in a climactic fight in their Romeo and Juliet), begins to disappear as actors wash off their greasepaint and strip off their costumes. To cheer themselves, the troupe relies on the broad slapstick of the vaudeville they have just performed, drunkenly playing on the dressing room piano and reenacting comedic bits from the show. Even when the play is at its most emotionally volatile, we never forget we are in the dressing room of comedians; one explosive argument is temporarily settled when a character launches a rubber fish across the dressing room at his cast mate.
Through this strategic use of various period performance styles, the ensemble begins to examine the purpose of performance itself. Because of their justifiably heightened theatricality, The Mad Ones call attention to the very nature of being theatrical. Diversion is at least the implied goal of the literally besieged radio show in Samuel and Alasdair, as The Host cheerily offers at the top of the broadcast: “We have a great show for you today, my favorite story - OUR favorite story - and perhaps a favorite story of many of you, told at bedtime by Mom and Pop…” But in working so hard to ignore the coming destruction, they allow the terror to stand out in relief. To label is to limit, the expression goes, and the At Home Field Guide’s inability to talk about what awaits the cast outside the radio studio leaves the terror limitless. Diversion is also useful for the troubled vaudevillians of The Tremendous Tremendous; note the wonderfully clownish reenactment, complete with piano accompaniment, of how Charlie (Joe Curnutte) lost his foot in the First World War. That the performance is a complete fabrication intended to tease the new cast mate, Squid (Michael Dalto), as well as hide the real, more painful story, is both funny and poignant. The audience never learns the truth, but gains a wonderful insight into the characters through a skillfully performed lie.
The effect of this performance-as-diversion ruse is to very deeply embed the narrative in subtext, as if the story itself is a riddle the audience must solve. The company has received some criticism in reviews for this tendency: the recent take in Backstage warns readers that “promising narrative threads poke through here and there, but [The Tremendous Tremendous] strenuously avoids following through on any of them, as if aimlessness were a virtue in itself…”. But the narrative is by no means aimless. The narrative is simply very subtle; as in life outside the theatre, there is little explicit exposition. We as an audience never learn what ultimately became of the Abbotts’ missing father figure Murray, or what role Lu (Stephanie Thompson) had in his disappearance. It is simply enough for us to watch Henry (Henry Vick) begin a stunning, transformative impersonation of a character the audience has never met, and it is enough for us to see the effect this has on his haunted cast mates. The Buddy Hackett-like clown that emerges from Henry donning a cocked bowler cap and a threadbare old coat presents one of the most powerful moments in the show. As a result, we catch a glimpse of the force that brought these characters together and may ultimately drive them apart. Likewise, whatever lurks outside the radio studio in Samuel and Alasdair is suggested but never shown. This lack of clarity leaves the audience in a suspenseful state of terror-by-association. Fittingly, Mischa’s deep, possibly unrequited romantic feelings for Anastasia are never so clear as when the power goes out and the characters are left alone in darkness and silence. In artifice and obfuscation, and through the little gaps between them, shines a larger truth.
The Mad Ones opened their second collaboratively written show at the Brick Theatre in Williamsburg last week. The Tremendous Tremendous, like their award-winning Samuel and Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War, explores with humor, dangerous subtext and deeply engrossing performances the use of artifice in revealing truth. Also, someone gets hit with a rubber fish. Must see.
