Didn't the Stranger also de-suggest some Russian cat circus thing a year or so ago? I forget the details.

Yes! Correcting...

NO DICE is one of the Best, if not The Best, performance I have ever seen. I see theater a lot. I am not a theater critic, but I am a theater maker and I am very very critical. I used to live in Seattle (born and raised), then I moved to New York (where I saw NO DICE along with many many many other things). Now I live in Providence, RI where I am getting my MFA in Playwrighting at Brown University...which is to say: Brendan's opinion is only one man's, I offer my opinion (with a bit of context)in the hopes that his does not discourage you from finding out for yourself whether NO DICE is in fact, as the German's said, something that only comes along once every ten years.

Forget the theater troupe. I want to know more about this "magicians' library." Are they hiring? Does G.O.B. have a membership?

So it's game-based AND uses found text (in this case, the telephone conversations) AND has a dinner theater "framing device" (for lack of a better phrase) AND dancing... that's a bit overstuffed, from where I'm sitting. Forced Entertainment could get a good show out of the telephone conversations alone. Simplify, maaan!

(That's said, I'd probably like it if I saw it, but I don't have time for 4 hours of theater these days.)

Cary Grant is turning in his satin lined closet, I mean, coffin...

I thought this show was great. I'd sit through all 4 hours again just to watch those dance numbers.

Brendan, thanks for inviting critiques of your critique. I don't care what the Euros think, but I fucking love this show full stop, and have hoped it would come to Seattle since it first knocked me out at TBA in Portland, fall 2007. I hope I get to see it again, again.

The piece is an attempt, I think, to be heartfelt and real, and to use a million alienation devices (bad accents, overacting, repetitive found gestures, goofy costumes, dance breaks) as a way of letting you listen to everyday conversations without associating them with specific persons or situations (the only proper nouns, till the very end, are brands of soda, movie actors, New York City, and acronyms for office forms). Through that transmutation, the conversations don't actually take on weight, but you can hear in them a general hum of loneliness, desire, frustration, ambition, and love. (The alienation devices, I should point out, are also often crack-you-up funny.)

In terms of actual theater, I love the way the absurdist stage aspects have analogs in the text, and how those connections are revealed over the course of the evening. The connections between signifiers are not then made especially meaningful, but the structure itself begins to take on a strange, lovely abstract form. A clear distinction is being drawn between the mundane and art, even art derived entirely from the mundane.

As the show's concerns move directly toward theater (which appears in the debased form of midwestern dinner theater), it makes an argument for art which is not transcendental, nor realistic in any standard conception of the term, nor well-made in the typical sense, but incredibly human.

Also, I love to pieces the handsome bearded hipster in Hasidic pirate mufti doing an amazing geekdance over human beatboxing, alongside an Irish-Jewish cowboy with a fake mustache, and a French lady in a wig, leotard, and American Apparel jogging shorts, who stops the music to holler "I'm a sexy robot!" And then dances some more.

Who knows if anyone deserves the reputation they have... does it matter? I loved the whole puzzle. The gesture game, the accents that came and went, the subtle costume changes. Sure, I've seen things like this before, but it didn't stop me from wanting to stick with these performers to find out what they were working through. I esp. enjoyed the ready-made theater element... the fancy curtain with the masks really topped it off. Frankly, I find that sort of thing hilarious, so I'm a good audience member for them.

It's interesting that you say the show didn't need to be four hours long, when one of the main things the show was about was time (if you're at a four-hour show, that's a good bet), how we spend it and "waste" it--with inane conversations, jobs that gets us nowhere, bad dinner theater--but the questions raised in the white-wig lady's monologue were interesting: Does the content of the boring conversations matter as much as the need to have them? Maybe it isn't so much the content of what we saw as the need to be there with a group of people who *want* to sit in a weird performance space for four hours. So, I think they are asking the audience: what is wasted time? Did you just waste your time? That's a valid question with any performance. And we'll have different answers for that, which is cool and exciting.

"No Dice" is a gimmick plain and simple. It was an effective gimmick for the time and place it was produced but it is still a gimmick and over the course of time this gimmick, like all gimmicks has become dated and worn thin. It isn't really surprising that it was so warmly received in 2007 before the massive lay-offs to come, the housing bubble that was just about to burst, and the fact we were still having debates about whether or not we could actually use the word recession. On the night the play was seen in Seattle, (which was their 100th showing) the national unemployment rate jumped up to something like 8.1%. I know that this might seem un-related but I actually think they are very closely linked to the failure of "No Dice" in Seattle. Through out the Bush administration we had very interesting relationship with language in this country and how we used words. We also pointed our fingers at everyone but ourselves for the problems our nation was facing and about to face. There was also a very strong sense of apathy in this country. We broke our own laws and invaded a sovereign nation, let corporations run wild, and created an imagined other to hate and fear. While most Americans watched on television . I think this play captures a lot of that sentiment. However, now there is a much more visceral feeling of fear in America. Which is a paradox because our tag lines have moved from FEAR, and Terror to HOPE and CHANGE. People are being forced back into a very grim reality our apathy helped to create. This play doesn't and can't keep up with that. So the devices or gimmicks or whatever you want to call them become painfully obvious which allows for the thesis of the play to move forward and try to hold water. It does not. It like the American people at the time is too self-important. The apathy portrayed in the play feels wrong when placed next to the ideas within the text. So when the actors come to speak with the audience, though you might respect how hard they are working or have worked, or have been told they worked you still feel disconnected to them because you have been watching an American piece of theater that connected with an American Zeitgeist that no longer exists. It's Pop Art with a short shelf life. Even after four hours they are still just actors, its a zany company, and a zany play, but we've seen it before and the meaning and content of the ideas are still just as distant as when you sat down four hours prior.

I can't comment on the entire four hours, but I can tell you this: the four minutes I spent watching that YouTube video was a colossal waste of my time.

Ok, maybe it was only three minutes. BUT IT FELT LIKE FOUR.

Not to say that I don't highly regard your opinion, Brendan, 'cause I do, but..
TO M.A. @3: As you fancy yourself a theee-at-uh buff, have you seen Ilkholm? If so, what score out of ten would you give both?

FROM: A BadTheater-a-phobe.

I just watched half of the clip, and I thought it un-awful. Not sure I'd want 3:58 more of it, but it's kind of weirdly compelling. However, I found it interesting and mildly amusing, not laugh-out-loud funny. The constant audience tittering got on my nerves a lot. Definitely couldn't take that for four hours.

@ #5 - The next show at On the Boards is actually written by Tim Etchells, the director of Forced Entertainment. And its only an hour long. Full disclosure - I work over at OtB, but thought you'd be interested.

@ 8

Having seen it (or half of it) last night, I think the way you write about it is far more interesting than the show itself. Glad I left at intermission...

This review from the theater critic who hardly stays after the first intermission or falls asleep during the show because he's tired from being out all night.

@ 16

I leave one or two shows a year, tops. And see three or four shows a week. You might have noticed that Misha, in her review today over at the Seattle Times, admits to leaving No Dice at intermission. (Which I didn't.) It's not a crime to skip fewer than 1% of all the shows you see.

Anything that makes Germans laugh is not worthy of our consumption or patronage...

either way, they gave us a memorable section in the lyrics of one of my favorite songs ever,
(from 'going for a walk with a line' by Momus)

Incognito, my little female circus rider
From the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma would have to go

Rainy weather by the river
Snake paths in the grass...

@9 The questions the lady in the white wig asked at the end were moronic. It was as if you were too stupid to be asking yourself these questions the whole time so just to wrap it up and pound you over the head with it they would make a really nice plea to audience. Why didn't she just say: "Our show has merit. It does. It really really does. Now the actors are going to be very sincere and talk to you."

That isn't awkward ever.

God what a joke.

I saw the whole show and enjoyed it. I didn't find it transcendent and indeed it didn't build to a glorious epiphany, but it was frequently funny, very frequently entertaining, and only dragged a couple of times across four hours.

Did it need to be four hours? Probably not, but on the other hand, what else was I gonna do on a Thursday night? See WATCHMEN?

@20 Did the monologue kill the show for you, or were you already fed up way before that?

I wouldn't even say that the monologue killed the show for me. Thins after the monologue killed the show. That monologue just really weakened it. Rather then let the show rest on the merit that the ensemble had been building for 3 hours it tells you how you should feel and think about the piece. What it did do is ensure that I "got it"and rather than think I should go the the piece again to re-investigate and examine it as a piece of art I was able to leave feeling good that I was not dumb and what I thought they were getting at they really were getting at.

um.

i liked it. quite a bit.

whether the show itself was entertaining to everyone or not, i was impressed with the simple fact that all those people had the balls/had the idea to do something like that.

I was deeply disappointed by "No Dice". Which is partly the trouble when listening to and believing the hype, I suppose. I hoped and expected to be blown out of the water by this piece. I wasn't. I wanted to be - I like theater and really want it to be good, every time I see something I hope it is remarkable. This piece was boring, hollow, trite, submissive, and well, simply too simple. I don't know if the piece was once very good at the very beginning of NTOK's very long run. It seems obvious that the performers are bored of the piece. The "gesture games" and "found warehouse spaces" can only provide momentum for so long. Additionally, the theme that there are no more stories, that the existential dread of living life where nobody knows anything and nobody can tell the stories that don't exist (a theme borrowed from Beckett, Ionesco, Bond, Crimp, and countless others) is tired. It's a difficult theme for performers and audience members to invest in. Then, when it became clear that I was supposed to feel that "life is in the small stuff" like PB&J and Telephone Conversations With Your Mom and Silly Dancing With Your Friends, I found myself thinking about Oprah and Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, not about life, America, storytelling, god, love, or anything that really matters. If that's the point of their piece, I want my money back, so that I can buy a copy of Chicken Soup for the Bored & Disappointed Soul.

Thanks Brendan. We saw it Friday night and I'm glad I missed your de-Suggests yesterday but glad that I saw it today to confirm my feelings. As you can see from the comments (and the audience reactions) some people loved it and some didn't... I'm in the latter group. I think the show tried to be profound and funny, but came out absurd and boring. I stuck it out the whole show (though it's a bad sign that they came on at the beginning telling us how long it was until intermission (97 mins) and that Act 2 was more interesting than Act 1... Bad, bad sign.) It was the 3rd or 4th show this season that played with repetition (Superamas, Kidd Pivot, Five Days in March all doing so, and better, to boot.) Also, there was no reason for it to be staged in the office building where it was. The OtB mainstage would have been perfectly fine. I rate the show "okay", worth seeing if you're already a subscriber and want to lose four hours, and worth passing if you're not. I'd give it an okay-plus if the cowboy had taken his shirt off like in the clip. At least I could have ogled him while I ignored what they were saying.

Still waiting for those mea culpas for recommending the putrid "The Ten Thousand Things" and the excruciating "Streetcar Named Desire"- oh, that's right- the writer of one and the director of the other are Brendan's friends.

looks great. and by the way - this is in brussels so that would be belgians, not germans...

@ 27. Nobody's reading this thread any more, but I should defend myself and Sheila Daniels and Paul Mullin. They're nice, talented folks who are fun to talk to, but they're not my pals.