Elimination
at Sheffield’s Beer and Wine Garden
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A collaborative effort by performers Brian Mendes, Chris Sullivan, and Vicki Walden and director David Pavkovic, Elimination takes place in a 13-foot-square playing area fenced in on all sides by the audience. Above the performers eight bare bulbs hang from a grid of copper pipes. Below them the floor is an inch deep in salt. The actors rarely speak in anything louder than what my long-suffering father used to call “inside voices,” and the piece as a whole consists of tiny gestures and subtle glances, most of them intentionally unremarkable or ungraceful (several dancelike sections, in which the performers are paired with a weighted aluminum can, are some of the most engagingly maladroit in Cook County’s extensive repertoire).
The metaphor of a boxing match serves this enigmatic production well, for one of its central concerns–if it can be said to have them–seems to be the close connection between intimacy and violence, the natural outgrowth of such cramped quarters. In one of the evening’s recurring motifs, Mendes, the perfect comic chump, tries to force Walden, the only woman, to stand in a particular but apparently arbitrary spot. Eventually Mendes draws a circle in the salt, snaps his fingers, points to the circle, and barks at her to stand there, as though beckoning a dog. Walden, whose steely countenance remains unchanged throughout the evening, sometimes acquiesces and sometimes offers Mendes handfuls of salt instead, metaphorically rubbing it into his gaping insecurities. Then everything is forgotten and the performers move on to execute their next seemingly random task.
Every few minutes the show bogs down as Neveu and Simpson unpack new puppets from numbered cardboard boxes and repack the ones just used. These long transitions are the only unintentionally incompetent moments in an evening that otherwise gallops along with a giddy momentum. Neveu and Simpson–brilliant impersonators of truly talentless puppeteers–sustain their inanity for an hour, inventing so many imaginative manifestations of ineptitude that they reveal just how talented they really are.
