YOU’RE BLOCKING MY VISION OF REALITY
Endangered Species Theatre Company at Cafe Voltaire
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The situation comes right from Pirandello, but writer-director-actor Schiff has omitted all philosophical grounding and sense of play. A frustrated. author named Frank (Bill Russell) picks up a water pistol and interrupts a play he claims he wrote himself 15 years before and another writer stole and trivialized. Frank’s work, called Coffee With Sweet and Low, was his depiction of a “beautiful world,” a manuscript that supposedly made up for his lousy job as a technical writer. But in the actors’ contamination of his play–it’s never quite clear who are the saboteurs, the actors or the supposed second author–urine is substituted for coffee. Such artistic violations piss Frank off.
Schiff’s submoronic humor doesn’t even trigger the groan reflex; his idea of wit is to have one character tell another, “You have a chip on your shoulder. (PAUSE) I mean you really have a chip on your shoulder.” It’s too dumb for a groan, too bland for a gag reflex. Even more peculiar, the play opens with a sadistic waiter (Rob Southgate) howling instructions at the audience not to sneeze under any circumstances. Go figure.
This hour-long one-act–the inaugural work of the Sleeping Dog Theatre Company, a group of theater artists who met at Illinois State University–is a self-indulgent actor’s exercise. Its one challenge is to our patience. Depicting the title character’s disastrous New Year’s Eve, it clumsily strings together a series of diffuse but obvious, dramatically inert incidents, each drawn directly from the playwright’s experience: childhood memories are plopped down as if speaking them on a stage will make them drama. It doesn’t.
Sleeping Dog’s press release poignantly says, “We really hope that this isn’t our last show.” I hope so too–they must have more to offer than this.
