NY Clown Theatre Festival in Review

nytheatre.com is asking two of its contributors to spend an evening at the NY CLOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL. Their impressions of these evenings are being posted here.

Evening 2: September 9, 2008 - MITCHELL CONWAY

I had the privilege of seeing three shows as part of this year's New York Clown Theatre Festival. Big & Little and El Magnifico were performed as a unit, followed by Manifesto! a little bit later. All three were original, enjoyable, and involved a great deal of pickle-eating and pratfalls.

One clown has shoes. Another doesn't. They become friends. Who would think that a premise such as this could spawn such a wonderfully funny and tender show? Noah Bremer ("Big") opens the production Big & Little, showing off his shoes to the audience. His demented excitement as he gestured towards his feet in alignment with the music made me love the character almost immediately. Although I missed having an extensive introduction like Big's for Galen Treuer ("Little"), there was no question that he grew on me along with the friendship between the clowns. After they battled over the stolen shoe with some quite impressive acrobatics, just watching the day-to-day activities of two buffoonish friends could not have been more entertaining and charming. Quick scenes involving brushing teeth together or chewing a huge pickle in time with "The Blue Danube Waltz" remained compelling with the only overall plot being the development of their friendship. Dan Turpening provides a perfect accompaniment to the piece, principally playing the accordion, but also filling in with a wide variety of sound effects.

Big & Little closes with a heartwarming scene of the two friends watching the sunset and falling asleep back to back—I could not help the affectionate smile that rose across my face.

In El Magnifico, an incompetent magician and his pregnant assistant are ridiculous and disturbing but never miss a chance to emphasize a trick with a slick hand gesture. David Engel (El Magnifico) is a deranged, mumbling, partner to the forced-smile, sleazy Hilary Chaplain (Wife). There is a delightful mix of some actually impressive tricks, like pulling a pickle jar out a hat, and some hilarious foul-ups, like dropping the assistant right onto her heavy-with-child stomach. Some wonderful puppetry is accomplished after a small furry critter is pulled from a hat. After some playful feeding and gentle wrestling, the critter goes straight for the magician's jugular. The key to the show's success is the constant inept attempts to appear impressive amidst failure. There is always a scowl behind their grins and fear of rejection behind their theatrical gesturing. This desperation combined with the characters' almost frightening put-on smugness results in a hilarious performance dynamic.

A tango between the Communist and Capitalist Manifestos, the repeated cha-cha of "What does Dada do?" and an extended futurist rant about the greatness of speed are all parts of Manifesto! The show, created by Happenstance Theater, consists of fragments of various manifestos performed in a bar by its owner, workers, and some visionary guests. No reason is ever given why the group is presenting these various manifestos, except in reaction to the presence of the guests. The players all temporarily take on the qualities of whatever current manifesto is being spouted. Although each governs the atmosphere of the bar for a time, one manifesto seems as arbitrary as the next.

Dada seems to be the dominant principle at work, since it is also the culmination of the show when audience members come on stage during the endless quest to discover the meaning of Dada. The dynamic between a new employee at the bar and her bosses frames the story, implying that despite all the rhetoric of manifestos, life itself remains essentially the same. It's all Dada.

Although some unnecessary non-manifesto text often takes away from the show, overall it is quite ambitious and well-executed. Mark Jaster (Middleman) gives a performance that certainly stands out for its dedication and specificity throughout. Matthew Pauli (Visionary) also hits the piece head-on, and creates one of the funniest moments in the play with an overly dramatic death that takes minutes. There are also a number of very funny moments between Sabrina Mandell (New Girl) and Scott Burgess (Bar Tender), visible above or hidden below the bar, such as when she mimics Maia DeSanti (Hostess) tapping the bar for a drink, only to receive a broom.

I truly enjoyed my experience with the Clown Festival, and I cannot wait for it to come around next year!

Evening 1: September 7, 2008 - DANIEL KELLEY

The grim reaper in his long black cloak rows a poor dead soul into the depths of the underworld, while Mozart's Requiem fills the theatre. An eccentric homemaker does her morning exercises by pumping her kneecaps and chanting the opening chords to "Eye of the Tiger." These are moments in two very different clown shows now playing at the Brick Theatre's 3rd Annual Clown Theatre Festival. One show is pure escapism—a frolicsome, light-hearted romp, full of gags and slapstick. The other uses the elements of clown theatre to probe deeper, exploring the very nature of living and dying. Which is which, however, may surprise you.

The first is Ten West, a self-titled show from the LA-based comedy duo of Jon Monastero and Stephen Simon. The subject of the show is as dark you as you get: it's a show about death, featuring scenes of pallbearers, funerals and of course, the grim reaper himself. Ten West's take on this most depressing of topics, however, is decidedly sunny—the road to Ten West's hell is paved with goofing off. That is exactly what happens in one scene as a lost soul (Monastero) starts playing around on his trip across the river Styx—making faces, splashing water, and bopping about. The Grim Reaper (Simon) then becomes his straight man, and hilarity ensues as the dead soul becomes sillier and sillier and grim reaper becomes angrier and angrier. It also doesn't hurt that Simon is about two or three heads taller than Monastero, completing the classic comic paring. This is world of Ten West—whimsical, fun loving and classically vaudevillian.

Perhaps the most impressive part of Ten West's performance, however, is that it is almost completely silent, relying instead on the performers' bodies and faces to communicate. The elasticity of both of these performers and the clarity of their choreography make this feat seem easy and natural. Their communication is so complete, however, that occasionally I found myself getting a little ahead of where the performers were going. But these moments were few and far between. Ultimately, Ten West's goal in presenting this show about death is to entertain, and that they do with great style and skill.

The second show is a one-woman piece from France entitled C'est La Nuit Qu'il Faut Attraper La Lumiere (It's the Night That You Have to Catch the Light). The show's subject matter seems to be the eccentric life of a homemaker, Miss Oberniche, who lives her life hour by hour doing chores around the house. One can almost imagine the hijinks that will unfold. However, from the onset, it is clear that Orianne Bernard's performance is not trying to be anything of the kind.

The piece opens with Miss Oberniche waking up at seven o'clock—one hour before she has to actually get up and start her day. The knowledge that she still has an hour to sleep brings Miss Oberniche into a state of intense euphoria. She responds as though she has just won the lottery. A moment later, she finds her alarm telling her its eight o'clock. At this point, Miss Oberniche experiences a kind of horrific dread that she has to get up, as though this were some awful kind of flesh-rending torture. She forces herself to get up, literally kicking and screaming, trying with all her might to stay in bed. Throughout the piece, Bernard's Miss Oberniche experiences these kinds of grotesque exaggerations of feeling, moving from ecstasy to despair in seconds. Through it all, though, Miss Oberniche is always alone—save for the flowers she talks to as her girlfriends, and her imaginary boyfriend Redwood. As the piece progresses, we begin to see Miss Oberniche deteriorate: things once done with a spring and a leap become less interesting and less easy to accomplish. By seeing this character live so extremely through the tiniest things—having coffee, exercising, knitting, eating lunch—and then watching her deteriorate, the audience is able to see the grotesque sadness of a life spent completely alone, isolated from the world. The show then becomes a metaphor for a kind of global living—the need to live beyond the minutiae of day-to-day life, and reach out to help people in need. This point is hit home powerfully late in the show and is obviously a message that is felt very deeply by Bernard, who uses her clowning skills in hospitals around the world. C'est La Nuit Qu'il Faut Attraper La Lumiere is at once hysterically funny and deeply moving, using the larger-than-life stylization of clown performance to send a profound message about real-world living.

Following one after the other, these two shows are emblematic of the power of clown theatre to turn the expected on its head. Clowns have the power to take the somber and make it silly, and to take the silly and make it brutally heartbreaking. Whichever side of the coin you're in the mood for, you're bound to find it in among the host of offerings at the Brick Theatre's Clown Theatre Festival.