YOUR BUTT
Avenue Theatre
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Apparently the networks think Metraform’s big attraction is that it speaks in some way to the hopes and fears of what some have dubbed generation X and others refer to as the 20-something crowd. If this is true, and Your Butt is any indication of what’s slithering through the collective unconscious of the under-30 crowd, then generation X is much more cynical and pessimistic than I thought. Certainly Your Butt is a much bleaker comedy than I thought I’d see at the Annoyance, where dark comedies such as Coed Prison Sluts, Manson: The Musical, and That Darned Antichrist are the norm, not the exception.
Which is not to say Your Butt is artless. In many ways it is much richer, less fragmented, much more complete and philosophically coherent than previous Metraform efforts. Soloway’s songs–which run the gamut from the silly (“You can reach up to the stars / You can reach even higher”) to the profane (“See Maggie Maloney / She’s a shriveled old cunt”) to the very profane–are tightly nestled in the structure of the show, unlike Coed Prison Sluts, in which many of her songs had the same relation to the overall story as TV commercials do to what they interrupt.
Here the story is set in a small theater company devoted exclusively to the nurturing of new plays and playwrights. We meet the various opinionated playwrights associated with the theater, all of whom love their own work, hate everyone else’s, and have reason to resent the autocratic artistic director, Prissy Playgood. Naturally, Playgood is murdered before the end of the first act, and most of the extremely talky second act is devoted to uncovering her killer. Not one, not two, but three parodic sleuths–Ellery Clean, Inspector Trousseau, and, ugh, Charlie Sham–have been brought into the case, which hardly adds to this humorless comedy.
