CIRCUS OF BLOOD, SMORGASBORD OF PAIN
Prop Theatre at the Garage
The first tale consists of little more than an extended interview with a female mortician (Ariel Brenner) who has a rather perverse relationship with her corpses. The director, Jonathan Lavan, helpfully illustrates the mortician’s perversion with a disgusting bit of mimed necrophilia in the stage area behind the interview. Watching this gratuitously voyeuristic ending, it’s hard not to feel sorry for the actress (Deborah Sale) who must fake sex with a corpse three nights a week just because some creepy director told her to.
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Unfortunately, one worthwhile story well told hardly makes up for four miserable, offensive ones.
Much of it sinks under the weight of Pitts’s self-indulgent tendency to confuse obscurity with profundity. This is never more apparent than in a pair of scenes about love. In the first scene a particularly pathetic man (Joel Tatom) reads aloud his profoundly self-pitying poem about a recently begun love affair. “Don’t let this be another mirage,” he whines, and then continues on with ten or so lines of extremely bad verse. This scene is followed by one in which his new beloved (Karrin Sachs) reads her understandably wary but no less pathetic reply: “Don’t become my solo spotlight.” It’s not hard to understand the pair’s fears, but it is hard to feel pity for two so determined to hide their feelings behind such obscure poetry.
