NATURAL HOSTAGES
at Cafe Voltaire
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This simple story allows playwright Bryn Magnus to bring together a wild mix of ridiculous yet curiously familiar characters, all of whose lives are more or less centered around ascending the hill. There are Meta and Nathan Gorgey (Marianne Fieber and Mark Comiskey), “the honeymooningest couple in the world,” who have successfully avoided consummating their marriage for two years in the hopes of becoming famous comedians and being invited up. There is Earl Treechair (Paul Tamney), a joke of a sculptor–he works in asphalt–whose life is one humiliating insult after another until he receives his invitation. And there is Ros (Jenny Magnus), the earthy, self-sufficient sprout farmer who wants nothing to do with the whole business. The curious figures of the Mephistophelian Dr. Signialli (Beau O’Reilly) and his sidekick Crysalis (Jennifer Cozzi), a woman who has successfully taught herself not to feel a thing, hover throughout the play.
As a result, when people finally get what they’ve wanted for so long, it leaves them more empty than before. When the ever-abused Treechair kills himself and, paradoxically, rises to the top of the heap, forcing even the magical Dr. Signialli to sing and dance for him in the underworld, he can find bliss only in loving a fellow corpse. When Meta and Nathan Gorgey finally rent a cheap hotel room to consummate their marriage, they go to such extraordinary lengths to feel some sort of erotic attraction for each other that they exhaust themselves and fall asleep without even a kiss.
The Clownarchists–Drew Richardson and George Fuller–stand at the beginning of their artistic development. Their one-hour performance at Cafe Voltaire, The Evolution of D and Gerald, about two intentionally lackluster and talentless clowns who spend the evening trying to evolve, is full of unintentional missteps and false starts. But the agenda these artists have set for themselves–to explore the violent and sadistic side of the human soul through a clown show–is so extraordinarily difficult that at this point in their careers they can’t be expected to succeed.
