The people of the boom! theater company are young and mostly Cornish grads, and both times I've attended their performances, the audience has been small—between five and maybe a dozen people, most of whom seemed to be friends with the actors. That would be sad if the work was lame. But boom! produces work that is funny and rambunctious and energetic, so the small houses feel like the fledgling moments of something promising, something Seattle just hasn't discovered yet.
The people at the door are super-friendly, actors and directors can often be found smoking out front while welcoming theatergoers, and the booze is cheap. A bunch of friends laughing and drinking and making theater for each other could seem insular, but the camaraderie and affection makes it welcoming instead. This week was the kickoff of boom! theater's New Works Festival, which will run for two and a half months.
The festival is scheduled in blocks: On alternating days, you can see either "group one" or "group two," each a set of three plays—one long, two short. Last weekend, I saw the second group: ROAR, by Chelsea Hanawalt and directed by Nicholas Spinarski; bookmouths, written and directed by Ellen Elizabeth Steves; and an untitled piece billed as "no description," written and directed by boom! artistic director Steven Ackley. (After a break in mid-March, the festival will switch to a new schedule with two new "groups" for the rest of the run.)
Many elements of ROAR could set your teeth on edge, but it pulls that fundamentally theatrical trick of starting with awkward bones and ending with something beguiling. ROAR's awkwardness begins with two guys in Snuggies and ends with the music video for Hanson's "MMMBop," but it's thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish. Joshua Williamson and Robert Kompare play archetypal road-trip buddies: Williamson as the adventurous, catalytic jackass and Kompare as the dopey, good-hearted follower. Their characters are a study in surprise and ridiculousness, a mix of faux-masculinity and deep quirkiness, singing and dancing and brawling.
Early in the show, they accidentally break their TV set, which sends them into paroxysms of grief and terror—they fall to their knees weeping, Williamson trying to give the appliance CPR while Kompare screams, "Do I really have to read?" A nearby copy of National Geographic inspires a road trip to the Grand Canyon, modeled after the Lewis and Clark expedition, with Hanson as their soundtrack. Williamson, as Lewis, says offensive things so casually, stupidly, and without malice that it's almost charming: "Sacagawea? I'd do her," and a description of Thomas Jefferson's greatness that concludes "and he impregnated a hella hot black chick." I know—those lines sound terrible on paper. But Lewis is so clueless and naive, he honestly thinks they're compliments, provoking laughter instead of anger. (He reminds me of the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill—the casual sexism on that old record sounds so impotently dumb, and the sitting-around-eating-canned-spaghetti parts ring so true, it reads as comedy.)
The most indicative exchange in ROAR comes after they meet up with a runaway teenager they conscript as the Sacagawea of their epic journey. "You guys are weird," she spits at Lewis. "Uh, no. We're awesome," he replies, in the tone you use to explain things to someone slower than you. As odd characters tumbling around a forest, writing in journals and choreographing dance routines, they are awesome in their own stunted way.
The second, more experimental half of the night is less fun. The company indulges in boundary-pushing, but to what end? In bookmouths, Angus Maxwell silently reads a book for 15 minutes while a voice-over broadcasts the text to us from speakers above the stage. The hero-quest story he's "reading" isn't worth the fanfare. The piece labeled "no description" involves darkness and computer-generated sounds played over the speakers, and it intends to invoke the feeling of a ghostly "presence." On the night I attended, the audience laughed nervously, someone burped, and someone else knocked over a beer can. It wasn't transcendent, but with the right mood, sitting in a strange darkness with friendly strangers isn't that bad. 
