Bald Faced Lie
Open Circle Theatre, 429 Boren Ave N, 382-4250. Thurs-Sat at 8; $12. Through Oct 21.
RAISED WITH A REMOTE control clutched in our hands, we Americans are a people constantly bombarded with tiny, glittering pieces of visual and aural information, from our first episode of Sesame Street to the latest rap video on MTV. This mosaic of unrelated and overwhelming stimuli has given birth to the perfect art form for our fractured attention spans: sketch comedy. From the original cast of Saturday Night Live in the 1970s through Kids in the Hall in the 1990s all the way up to the current season of Mad TV, these shows have saturated our cultural consciousness with memorable characters and inescapable phrases. If you’ve ever uttered “I’m a wild and crazy guy!” or “Isn’t that special,” then sketch comedy has touched you in a funny place. But rarely has a sketch comedy troupe been able to transcend the limitations of the genre and present something more than just bite-sized bits of humor that slide down easy but have no lasting nutritional value. You may laugh out loud at SNL, but does it ever make you think? Probably not.
Astoundingly, Seattle’s own Bald Faced Lie may have come close to coating sketch comedy with actual meaning in their wonderful new show at Open Circle Theatre: a fast and furious sequence of sketches thematically linked by the presence of a hapless character named Gary Lamb, played by David Gehrman. Gehrman’s rubbery good looks make the audience titter from the moment the lights come up, revealing Lamb in a particularly unpleasant situation of workplace violence: tied to a chair with a ticking bomb strapped to his head.
Stricken with terror by his impending fate and horrified by an indifferent hostage negotiator who attempts to talk his hysterical captor down from a million dollars to a couple of free coupons at Pizza Hut, Lamb is suddenly besieged by a surreal quartet of “flashers” (played by Ian Bell, Kirk Anderson, Peggy Gannon, and Karen Gruber). These efficient, jumpsuit-clad workers calmly remove him from the moment and lead him into the past to re-experience some highlights (but mostly low points) of his miserable, unfulfilled existence–causing the audience, between helpless guffaws, to genuinely ponder the question, “What’s the point of it all?”
From an evening being baby-sat by hilariously homicidal grandparents (“Sweetheart, when you go to sleep, I’m gonna cut you to bits!”) to his last day on Earth trying to learn the bewilderingly sexual language of a corporate meeting (“He slipped me a roofie and took me to the petting zoo!”), we watch Lamb stumble blindly through life with little direction or insight. Oddly, instead of growing more sympathetic to this Everyman, we begin to identify with the rest of the ensemble who work so hard at re-creating these memories. It seems like the least he could do is learn something from their stunningly choreographed and effortlessly executed display. But sadly, we leave Lamb just as we found him–a clueless corporate slave wearing a lethal dunce cap he is unable to remove.
“We didn’t want to make a play out of sketch comedy–we just wanted to create the best sketch-comedy show we could, and this was the next step for us,” says founding member Gehrman. Six years after meeting in a production of Star Drek, The Musical, Bald Faced Lie have carved out a very visible niche for themselves in a city crawling with comedy troupes (13 at last count). They’ve written and performed on Bill Radke’s nationally syndicated radio show, Rewind, on KUOW for three years, and also write and perform on KIRO’s The John Report with Bob, where their fresh perspective considerably enhances Seattle semi-celebrity John Keister’s rather exhausted repertoire.
“Being on the show has been very positive for us,” Gehrman says with one of his best boyish grins. “But we don’t want to ‘break into the biz’ and move down to L.A. We love Seattle.” And Seattle obviously loves them. But when asked what they will do when they inevitably exhaust the meager media outlets available here, Gehrman seems nonplused. “We want to do really cool theater and–if we’re given the opportunity–really cool TV. But the goal of excellent theater is always on top for us.” With this latest witty and challenging show, being on top is clearly their favorite position.