THE DUMB SHOW: A REAL LIVE FABLE
SOCK MONKEYS
This arc of growing up, with a nihilistic American twist, is the basis for Redmoon Theater’s The Dumb Show: A Real Live Fable. The fable is told in few words but with a great deal of spectacle. Redmoon has built a rickety proscenium arch and mounted a scroll of paper across the top. When the Cranker, a gangly man in whiteface (Grigory Khasin), turns his crank, it pulls another section of the scroll into view, on which are written the words of the fable. The characters are four “Basics”: men with huge papier-mache heads and hands, dressed in long white coats with painted-on buttons, whose awkward dancing is quite endearing. The Los Toallitas jazz band accompanies all of the action.
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Fish Tales’ tangential images about fish alternate with dance sequences. But the best moment comes when Bryan Saner and Kay Wendt LaSota exchange tall tales about fish: a “true story” about when it rained fish in Texas; another true story about how fish used to come out of the faucets in Chicago; a story that Charlie the Tuna’s voice is really Marlon Brando, who was down on his luck at the time; a tale about a lizard, called a Jesus lizard, that walks on water. The sections are connected only by association–a game of Go Fish becomes frenzied, the dancers slapping down the cards; the slapping becomes a movement motif that eventually turns into a stomping, spinning dance. Fish Tales is watery, dreamy stuff that works because of the performers’ charm.
