GONE
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Theater Oobleck specializes in mind-screws, plays whose summarized plots sound more like heinous LSAT word problems than traditional theater pieces. Their plays drop numerous political and cultural references and develop anarchic alternative worlds in which confusion seems to be the desired audience reaction. And yet the clique that gathers to see these efforts laughs uproariously at the insider jokes and raucously applauds every brilliant, semibrilliant, or completely gross effort of this troupe, defying any stranger who might conclude that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.
Gone, Oobleck’s latest opus, is a sometimes inspired, sometimes awful, sometimes outright disgusting absurdist romp through subatomic worlds, children’s literature, and the toilet bowl. Mickle Maher, who along with the rest of the Oobleck crew created this work, gives us a home in a planet called Healing Wound. Alan, a frantic intellectual, lives at home with his wife Verna, who is rapidly devolving into a reptile. They and their acquaintances, among them the vodka-swilling lush Beverly and the doctoral candidate Tom, who is working on a thesis written on origami paper that will engulf and destroy the doctoral review committee, are hurtled into subatomic space through a rather clever plot mechanism that I’ll leave the reader to discover.
