DRUM SOLO
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Drew Richardson has similarly grandiose ideas about the profundity of his work. He fills the program for his play Drum Solo with pretentious quotations about clowns from such diverse sources as Heinrich Boll (“I am a clown . . . I collect moments”) and Jacques Lecoq (“The clowns have taken the heroes’ place”), in the vain hope that we’ll be fooled into thinking that “clown theater and movement” is really an obscure branch of philosophy. Worse, Richardson has the audacity to say in his press release that Drum Solo is “one part Beckett, one part Keaton, and one part Wile E. Coyote.”
All Richardson shares with Beckett is a love for deceptively simple situations and language. However, Beckett always means more than he says, and in the end Richardson always means less. When Beckett places two clownish men in the middle of a desert in Waiting for Godot and lets them prattle on about their lives and daily routines, their conversation literally buzzes with significant ideas about the moral, spiritual, and philosophical dilemmas of our age. When Richardson places a clownish simpleton named Millll in the middle of the stage and has him tell us, “I like birds. I like doughnuts. I like birds and I like doughnuts,” he is after nothing more than that cheap mime emotionalism that equates simplicity with goodness and goodness with likability. Just how shallow, decadent, and mean-spirited Richardson’s sentimentality truly is becomes apparent a few moments later when Millll decides to commit hara-kiri after hearing the news that “the bird died” and “the doughnut company isn’t making doughnuts anymore.” Luckily Millll is even too stupid to know how to disembowel himself. He sticks the knife in (ha ha) but doesn’t die (ha ha ha).
