Strapheads
Graduate school does funny things to people’s minds. To celebrate my 23rd birthday my friend Stuart and I–both graduate students at the time–spent an evening making stupid faces in the mirror. Gradually we added dopey voices, costume pieces, dramatic lighting, and even background music, improvising elaborate melodramatic scenes for hours.
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Strapheads isn’t about much except the characters themselves. On the night I attended, those characters were without exception intriguing, nuanced and deeply human. A fleshy middle-aged woman with a gargantuan rear end and a perpetual expression of concern longs for the days when she won awards for her “jazz-slash-tap” routines. A nervous, fidgety high roller wannabe with a puffy green face runs around announcing, “I can make or break you.” An elderly man with a spine as scrunched up as his face has spent the last 15 years living in New Mexico trying to escape society, only to be followed by colorful brochures for mail-order record clubs everywhere he goes. The ads are so seductive, in fact, that now he spends most of his time trying to figure out who Toni Braxton and TLC are.
Paradoxically, the cast seem unconcerned with the conventions of plot, even though they’ve chosen to attempt scene work. It’s a curious oversight, especially considering the show’s clear indebtedness to commedia dell’arte, the plot-driven improvisational mask theater originating in Renaissance Italy (the press release’s assertion that Strapheads is “unlike anything ever staged” ignores several centuries of theater history). While Halpern is clearly not interested in commedia dell’arte’s highly exaggerated style, her company could learn from the form’s stock plot devices: mistaken identities, subterfuge, disguise, strangers revealed as long-lost siblings–the very devices Shakespeare borrowed in his comedies. Without some attention to plot, it’s nearly impossible for an improvised evening to go anywhere.
Commedia Smacks, which is not so much improvised as ad-libbed around a set story, concerns forlorn lovers separated by an inflexible father and a hapless servant transformed into a monster by a mad doctor. The story might have worked well as a 20-minute sketch, but here it lumbers along through 90 shrill minutes of fidgeting. The abundant physical comedy, reminiscent of old Warner Brothers cartoons, is not only sloppy and ill conceived but telegraphed miles in advance. Chicago’s New Criminals used to chew commedia up and spit it out with mesmerizing results. Transient just gums commedia around the edges.
