HEY! WHOOPS. BANG!
Cardiff Giant at Shattered Globe Theatre
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The main obstacle was the actors’ struggle to develop the characters. Each character is initially defined only by some personal trait. In the first scene of the first episode we met Dr. Thoron, a brilliant scientist and the victim of some side effect that made him horribly large, and his beloved assistant Debra, who’s unbearably sweet and innocent. They began the scene, using the audience suggestions of an ice factory for a location, a hand grenade as an object, and hard work as an activity. But things began to drag when the actors failed to move beyond the minimal quirky attributes assigned to their characters. As Thoron, Bob Fisher was affable enough, but when the scene failed to provoke laughter he resorted to self-conscious college jokes about Thomas Hobbes and PhD dissertations.
Thoron’s character, who soon became central in the story, remained only a caricature. Other main figures, such as Smoke, the femme fatale in his past (overplayed by Scott Hermes), were also built on forced humor. Here the joke was that a man was playing a sultry woman–and that’s as far as it went. Few strong relationships were developed, and that didn’t help move the story along.
In one of the evening’s funniest and most successful scenes the entire ensemble gets involved in a sketch that evolves from a group on a pier watching fish in the water to one of Poseidon’s henchmen planning an underwater coup d’etat. Another scene moves from a playful back rub to a scary scenario with echoes of In Cold Blood. That kind of progression wouldn’t be possible if the actors didn’t listen carefully to one another and weren’t willing to try out nontraditional themes.
