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September 17, 2004
TT: Sad clowns, cute psychopaths
After a two-week vacation-related hiatus, the Friday drama column of The Wall Street Journal is open for business again this morning. I reviewed two shows, Slava's Snowshow and an off-off-Broadway revival of Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane, and liked them both:Created by Slava Polunin, best known in the U.S. for his work with Cirque du Soleil, "Slava's Snowshow" is a zany fantasia for five melancholy-looking Russian clowns, several squirt bottles full of water, a dozen or so king-sized balloons, enough fog to shut down an airport and enough confetti to welcome home an astronaut.
I'm acutely allergic to pretentious clownery, so when I read that Mr. Polunin was influenced by Fellini and describes his brand of theater as "counter-Beckett," I reached for the nearest cream pie. Fortunately, nobody says anything out loud in "Slava's Snowshow" (nothing intelligible, that is), and whatever Mr. Polunin thinks it all means, the results aren't even slightly intellectual, though my guess is that American dancegoers will detect a certain resemblance to the quirky comedy of Pilobolus Dance Theatre, minus the dancing. To be sure, the self-contained vignettes that make up "Slava's Snowshow" are not without their dark moments--especially the bit in which Mr. Bolunin lurches around the stage with a chestful of arrows à la St. Sebastian--but judging by the ecstatic response of the children who came to the preview I saw, nobody was fooled for a moment. "Slava's Snowshow" is meant to make you smile, and it does so with impressive efficiency....
Joe Orton, the greatest farceur since Feydeau, has never quite gone over in this country, least of all on Broadway, where the most recent revival of an Orton play was in 1986 (and where his last and best play, "What the Butler Saw," has yet to be produced). If you want to see his work on stage, you have to depart the beaten path, so when I heard that Working Stiff Productions, an off-off-Broadway troupe, was presenting "Entertaining Mr. Sloane," I went out of my way to go. Jonathan Silver's staging, which runs at the American Theater of Actors through Sept. 25, is far from perfect, but it's more than good enough, and if you're unfamiliar with what Terence Rattigan called "the best first play" he'd seen in "thirty-odd years," it will give you a clear idea of what Orton was all about.
To watch "Entertaining Mr. Sloane" today is to understand at once why it ran for only 13 performances on Broadway in 1965. Back then, New York playgoers weren't exactly accustomed to folks like the title character, a lethally cute juvenile delinquent in tight pants (Stephen Weston, who is just about ideal) who comes to the South London home of Kath (Caroline Langford), a blowsy, middle-aged working-class woman of dubious virtue, looking for a room to rent. Kath promptly starts trying to lure her new boarder into bed. Enter Ed (Steve Pesola), Kath's brother, who has shinnied his way up the greasy pole to a suit-and-tie job, and who in turn decides that he wants to entertain Mr. Sloane in the sack. Enter Dadda (Sean Dill), the ancient father of Ed and Kath, who recognizes Mr. Sloane as a murderer and is foolish enough to tell him so. The ensuing hijinks soon take a deadly turn--which, amazingly, makes you laugh even harder....
No link, so if you want to read the whole thing, do the usual, just like yesterday: either buy a copy of today's Journal or subscribe to the paper's online edition.
Got it? Good.
Posted September 17, 2004 12:03 PM
