IN CHEAP SHOES
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In Cheap Shoes begins normally enough. Detective Ray enters wearing the standard-issue hat, trench coat, and dangling cigarette of a gumshoe. He walks like Bogart into Timmy’s butcher shop and then, turning to the audience, begins to narrate the story, in the tradition of all detective-movie parodies. He’s obsessed with a woman named Mindy, and he doesn’t mind telling us so. He loved her and she was beautiful but someone murdered her and now he’s on a quest to find her killer. Sure his descriptions of Mindy are more than a little perverse–“She wore stilettos like cotton candy wears a stick”–a bit more sexist and fetishized than most detective parodies ever allow themselves to be. And sure, Timmy the butcher seemed to get an inordinate amount of pleasure out of whacking the rubber chicken with a meat cleaver. But compared to Theater Oobleck’s previous work–including Three Who Dared: A Play on the Movies, The Pope Is Not a Eunuch, and The Slow and Painful Death of Sam Shepard–this play seems at first sight remarkably (and disappointingly) restrained.
Happily, a standard-issue detective parody could not have been further from Theater Oobleck’s collective mind, and it doesn’t take more than five minutes for this initial premise to be all but abandoned by everyone except Ray, who clings until the bitter end to the illusion that he is a character in a straight detective story.
This most collective of theater collectives doesn’t have a director per se; instead, anyone not on the stage helps direct by acting as an “outside eye,” “a suggestion giver,” or a “play clarifier.” The program credits 17 such “directorz.” The result of this collective direction is a show that can’t help but embody multiple points of view. Split into a thousand interesting fragments, it conveys a complexity and ambiguity missing from most comedy. Structurally, however, these shows are a mess, and people with a low tolerance for confusion should be warned from the very beginning that In Cheap Shoes may send them screaming from the theater.
