ALIVE
at Cafe Voltaire
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Nick Digilio and Mike Meredith’s Alive at the Factory Theater is one of the most wildly entertaining Tilt-A-Whirl rides about nothingness to hit the stage in quite some time, so gleefully paced that occasionally you can forget how depressingly empty the lives of its characters are. It’s like Beckett rewritten for MTV. This play succeeds where most other plays about disaffected jamokes in their 20s fail (see Generation Why? at Cafe Voltaire) because it explores complex, individual characters instead of blathering on about the struggles of a generation. This raucous, witty, vulgar, disgusting excursion into the lives of six all-too-familiar drinking-buddy slobs almost perfectly encapsulates the fast-talking, slow-moving life-style of that most heinous twentynothing figure: The Guy.
The characters would seem an obvious bunch–the disillusioned writer, the musician who can’t get a gig, the gun-toting redneck, and so on. But in Alive they’re more than hackneyed types: they’re actual living, breathing humans of the sort you can see every day working in bars, restaurants, and copy shops, dreaming big but still living with the folks and spending every weekend in the same sophomoric rituals. And it’s refreshing to see someone finally admit that the sexist bile that supposedly comes from the mouths of truck drivers and construction workers also comes from artists and writers and musicians. The references to 70s pop-culture icons (Abba, Star Wars) so prevalent in every recent play or movie about 90s youth (see Quentin Tarantino’s forthcoming flick Pulp Fiction: “Were you a Brady Bunch kid or a Partridge Family kid?”) aren’t just there for cheap laughs–in Alive those references reveal something about the characters. One scene in which two guys reminisce about their lost childhood by imitating all the figures in the Star Wars trilogy is especially hilarious, touching, and real.
Kevin King’s Kopy Kats, the second one-act of “Where’s the Cheese?,” also features a surprisingly slow pace for a late-night show, which needs to keep its audience awake. But where lack of speed has a thematic purpose in Burger Death, in Kopy Kats it’s merely evidence of overwriting and lack of direction. The many faults of this tame expose of the cutthroat world of advertising copywriters, with a script that continually belabors the obvious, are magnified by actors who seem to give the pauses between lines the same amount of time as the lines themselves.
