2 TALES WITH LEGS
Sometimes theater doesn’t make sense, or it makes the kind of sense that dreams make. Or as in the case of 2 Tales With Legs, only a dream can make sense of it. From what little I understand of Freud, dreams touch the untouchable; they put a curious finger on an inchoate anxiety. It could be a warning or simply an unraveling of tension. Theater can perform the same function. And the reason I believe I had such a surreal response to 2 Tales With Legs is that its two one-acts just begin to touch upon an anxiety so large, so menacing, that once touched, a follow-up nightmare was the only way I could gather it within my grasp.
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Now, this isn’t the sort of production that you can immediately understand and appreciate. It requires reflection. You have to leave the theater and see how these jigsaw impressions connect, which I did. And, since it was still early, I ran over to Theater Oobleck to catch their benefit performance of Eat My Fuck, already in progress. When I arrived, a cast of three Punchinellos were batting each other with large, pink nerf phalluses. A little later in the show, a half-naked woman slathered in raw egg and sprinkled with glitter expressed her desire to have someone’s testicles removed and coated in chocolate. By the end of the evening I felt like broken glass had rained on my head.
