Last weekend the Chicago Actor’s Ensemble opened its new late-night performance series, The Zero Room, in a tiny black room on the fifth floor of the Preston Bradley Community Center. The “Zero Room” is a fictional performance cabaret, and every Saturday night CAE members intend to create, according to press material, “a total performance environment featuring performance, poetry, art, video and music in a continuously changing multi-media format.” The Zero Room’s opening night proved a disorganized, uninspired disaster: it started a half-hour late and showcased a series of momentumless skits performed in oppressive heat while an annoying waiter kept wandering around offering people mashed potatoes. When intermission was announced at 12:30 and I realized that I’d seen everyone listed on the program, I decided to leave before my frustration grew into real anger.
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Worse, much of the humor in The Zero Room is based on dirty words, embarrassment about sex, or a combination of the two. Crud, the bouncer, introduces the evening by showing us his penis-shaped squirt gun–the mere presentation of the object is expected to elicit laughter. Molly McNett, a guitar-playing singer who seems meant to look like a sorority girl, sings two “scandalous,” puerile songs: “Sleazy bimbos have all the fun / I wish I were one,” and “Shit is quite a funny little word / It’s better than Poo, crap, or turd.” Emcee Valvolina-Colin even farts once for a laugh. And none of this humor is quite bad enough to be self-consciously bad. These performers never seem to laugh at themselves, never put their tongues in their cheeks.
