The Roethke
Unexpected Productions at Market Theater
Through July 29.
The Roethke is not just improvisational theater, but poetry-based improvisational theater. It sounds like a match made in hell, but the pairing—surprise, surprise—is a chocolate truffle: The poetry is a pithy, serious nut suspended in the sweet silliness of the improv.
Named for the irreverent and sometimes histrionic poet Theodore Roethke, The Roethke works like this: The Reader (on the night I attended, director Jeremy Richards) recites a poem (“Notes from the Air” by John Ashbery) that the improvisers are hearing for the first time. They use the poem’s images as inspiration for extemporaneous comedy while the Reader intermittently tosses in biographical information about the poet: “The more Ashbery was praised, the more critics claimed they didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.” Poems are dense knots of images and ideas—the improv pulls at their strings, forcing our attention on individual aspects of the poem, and their attendant associations, but not the poem itself. Ashbery seems tailor-made for this exercise. The first line of “Notes from the Air”: “A yak is a prehistoric cabbage: of this, at least, we can be sure.”
The Roethke has an aftertaste of Masterpiece Theater, but its dominant flavor is long-form improv—it lives (and dies) by its comedians. Watching Amanda Rountree and John Faga play out a fishing scene between a deadpan adversarial couple is funny. Watching the ensemble grope through a cocktail-party scene, trying to find a punch line, is embarrassing—but that (plus $10) is the price of admission. And for poetry-based improv, The Roethke is better than you’d expect. BRENDAN KILEY
14/48: The World’s Quickest Theater Festival
3-Card Monty and One World Theatre at Capitol Hill Arts Center
Through July 22.
It’s everything you shouldn’t do to put on a brilliant production: Seven writers get together and choose a unifying theme, at random, out of a hat. They each write a short play overnight. The plays are assigned—again, at random—to seven different directors, who randomly select actors. Each play is rehearsed for a few hours, performed before an audience of hundreds—twice—and the next day, they do it again. By the end of the 48 hours, 14 plays have been conceived, gestated, and birthed from nothing.
Last Saturday—theme: reasonable doubt—audiences witnessed tragic skydiving bridesmaids (pantomiming their actions on rolling office chairs), a corporate-funded flea circus, a lament from a mentally damaged middle-aged widow on why “it hurts to look at… young and beautiful” couples, an invisible woman (who held a large sign that read “INVISIBLE”), and a girl-detective story gone horribly, deliciously wrong. This week: who knows? And, really, isn’t that wonderful?
The best plays were cartoonish in the finest sense, with an air of old Looney Tunes magic, a kind of charming, let’s-put-on-a-show breathlessness. The vivacious musical accompaniment (some songs covered last Saturday: “Highway to Hell,” “Going to the Chapel,” and “The Rose”) and the show’s new digs at CHAC, which looks rather like a high-school gymnasium, make the whole thing greater. It’s a demented gonzo pep rally: exciting and funny and crazy and there’s nothing else quite like it. Sure, there are always gonna be a couple of plays that crash, but, really—what did you do with your last two days? PAUL CONSTANT
Circus Contraption’s Grand American Traveling Dime Museum
Circus Contraption at Magnuson Park
Through July 23.
The circus, of late, has been hijacked by the family-values set—buffed, spandexed, and defreaked in gilded, air-conditioned halls. Such polished whimsy is nice, but it’s not quite right: the circus shouldn’t be nice—it should be gritty, perverse, and a little bit evil. Thankfully, through a macabre haze of dust and music and neo-Victorian fetishism, Circus Contraption’s Grand American Traveling Dime Museum is here to take back its grotesque roots, one singing pickled fetus at a time.
By turns bawdy, frenzied, and hushed, Circus Contraption barrels through a series of old-timey vignettes. A gypsy fortuneteller performs shimmying aerial rope tricks. An acrobatic cataleptic sings of the passion that burns “there beneath my dusty skin,” and her keeper, Dr. Calamari, chases a rogue fetus with a butterfly net. Nothing is so mathematically pleasing as synchronized, glow-in-the-dark juggling—except maybe, one discovers, a delicate narwhal shadow puppet. Contraption‘s house band—the Dime Museum Orchestra and Drinking Society, all gravelly vocals and swaggering, bleating brass—is worth seeing on its own.
Circus Contraption could benefit from a change of venue—and will, after this final two-week run. Magnuson’s auditorium feels incongruously normal, detached from the hallucination on stage, like watching a play about a circus rather than attending one firsthand. The weighty, unrelenting grotesquerie seems forced at times, especially in the show’s rockier first half. But there’s substance to the spectacle; the Devil, quite literally, being in the lovely, atmospheric details: the eerie twang of a musical saw, the supernatural prowess of a master whistler, or an accordion’s slow, wheezy intake of breath. By the time the mesmerizing, delightful finale rolls around, you’ll want to pack up and join. LINDY WEST
