AD-NAUSEAM
In this respect Doe has a lot in common with his creator, writer-director Ned Crowley. Given two acts and two hours of stage time, he can’t seem to decide whether he’s writing a character-driven comedy about a sad-sack writer, or lampooning the ever-deserving ad industry, or creating a dark, surrealistic satire about the way television has subverted the democratic process. An inspired writer could do all three, but Ad-Nauseam looks for all the world like the sort of comedy someone writes when he has nothing to say and two hours to say it in. Crowley desperately flits from idea to idea, style to style, never lighting on any one long enough to fully explore it.
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Then again, nothing in this show seems particularly insightful. Crowley’s lampoon of the advertising industry has been done a thousand times before, and better, by the likes of Stan Freberg, Bob Newhart, and Firesign Theatre. How many times do we have to hear that ad people are shameless? Or that they come up with ever stranger ideas to sell their product?
