CAREENING IS A SKILL: ESTRANGED MUSICALE
Before the play opens, as the audience wanders in, we see a man standing alone onstage, frozen in the process of reaching down to tie his shoe. This is the Nothing Is Everything Man (Louis Arata), an everyman who, we learn later, has become so lost and panic-stricken that he cannot act, cannot even tie his shoelace. This untied shoelace so effectively captures the Nothing Man’s debilitating malaise that I immediately wanted to rush out and tie it for him.
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The play begins with a song called “Darkness, Darkness.” Lefty Fizzle then enters and confirms the impression of despair. Fizzle (Beau O’Reilly) is an “old, farting vaudevillian” whose dilapidated costume recalls a circus ringleader come on hard times. As the master of ceremonies for the evening, he informs us straight off that “It was the worst of times, the meanest of times, a season of shit.”
An especially engaging and telling patient is Rosa Mae Carbuncle (Jenny Magnus), an animated, furious talker who eventually reveals her belief that she’s got a “cancer the size of a watermelon. It’s always growin’ and always swellin’.” The riddle for Carbuncle is why the staff, who don’t believe in the tumor growing on her neck, still give her pills to kill it. You can’t see it; but that doesn’t mean something’s not there.
O’Reilly’s and Magnus’s performances, as well as their writing, vitalize this show. O’Reilly’s Lefty Fizzle unifies the evening, provides some exposition, and is fascinating to watch. With his hair a mess of irregular ponytails jutting out at unlikely angles, like the sprung coils of some failed machine, Fizzle smiles and winks at and cajoles the audience, as if in complicity. Add his constant twisting and mangling of stock cultural phrases, and the effect is to hook the audience, building on a bond of common experience.
