KLOWN: PRICK US AND WE’LL BURST
Around the Coyote Festival
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The four clowns who make up Die Hanswurste–Joel Jeske, Kevin Sherman, Bruce Green, and David Schmidt–are tricksters of the first order. Their show, Klown: Prick Us and We’ll Burst, is filled with sophisticated and finely executed physical comedy routines, winning laughs not with pratfalls but with their wry comments on human nature. Again and again these four create comic distortions of our worst excesses–vanity, greed, petty sadism, resentment. In one of the more Monty Python-esque gags, one clown happily shtupping a pumpkin has his, um, member cut off by another clown who’s jealous of his moaning pleasure. (Like the Pythons, these clowns will blithely spill gallons of blood for a laugh.)
The four Klown performers, playing distinct characters, maintain a strict hierarchy. Schmidt is the highest-status clown, a short, nasty, sadistic authority figure who leers when he isn’t fuming; in his fez and formal jacket, he looks more than a little like Peter Lorre. Green, who looks a little like Spike Jones in whiteface, is bossy in a more blue-collar way, with his sarcastic smirk and quick anger. In one routine after another, Green victimizes the clowns below him in status, but Schmidt’s upper-class clown beats up on him.
That is Die Hanswurste’s larger societal joke, their meta-performance, if you will: just as their show both mocks and pays homage to German expressionist sensibilities, their publicity parodies the sort of overwrought, unskeptical material circulated to puff this year’s unpopular Chicago International Theatre Festival. And of course that’s what good tricksters are supposed to do–point out the weaknesses in the status quo and roar with laughter.
