Present Laughter
Playwrights are amping up the camp, the surreal, the loosey-goosey
By Misha Berson
Top row from left, Jayd McCarty and Sara Buffamanti in Ashlin Halfnight's Artifacts of Consequence, at NYC's Electric Pear Productions, 2009 (photo by Jeff Clarke); Will Greenberg, Matthew Rocheleau, Ben Steinfeld, Adam O'Byrne, Brian Hostenske in Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman's Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson at L.A.'s Center Theatre Group, 2008 (photo by Craig Schwartz). Bottom row from left, Jeff Tinnean and Trent Stork in Jordan Harrison's Act a Lady at Lincoln's Nebraska Repertory Theatre, 2010 (photo by Doug Smith); Tim Budd and Laura Tatar in Deborah Zoe Laufer's End Days at Iowa City's Riverside Theatre, 2010 (photo by Bob Goodfellow)
Rough economic times. Environmental disasters. Wars, famine, plagues. American democracy going to hell in a handbag.
Lord, we need some laughs. We might even require round-the-clock, intravenous laughter therapy when the going gets toughest.
Theoretically, this is the perfect moment for a new wave of theatrical comedy. We're already in something of a golden age of cable-news satire, with shrewd jesters like Jon Stewart, Keith Olbermann and Stephen Colbert finding the funny in a continuous tsunami of bad tidings.
Sophomoric buddy flicks and ditzy romantic film comedies are resurging at the cineplex, too. And online, one can while away the hours, mesmerized by and chortling at dumb human pranks, stupid animal tricks and silly/ingenious mini-musicals staged in offices, mall atriums, subways, wherever, by outfits like NYC's Improv Everywhere.
Yet how about the theatre, where a writer can actually stretch out and spin a story, a saga, instead of riffing off a joke or two—and, you know, maybe say something about human nature and the way we live now?
From my vantage point, there is indeed such a stage comedy renaissance underway, fueled by a burgeoning crop of younger playwrights. It has taken root in some high-profile regional houses (where the "comedy slot" on the season is still often filled by classical farces and time-tested romps), and fleetingly on Broadway (where neither "legit" comedy nor musical comedy rule supreme anymore).
But in midsized, small and sub-fringe venues around the country, there's often contemporary comedy on the marquee. Nimble playwrights are taking the measure of our time with wit at the ready, and adopting Pirandello's credo: "In view of the human condition, the only sustainable posture is one of humor."
The best of these up-and-coming writers are pursuing mirth boldly, buoyantly, incisively, with an ear tuned to the present but with a firm grasp of the universal fundamentals of rib-tickling—and the universal need to wrest laughter from public and private agony.
What's so funny on stage today? What's the au courant comic sensibility? Here are a few notable aspects of it:
Camp and Snark
These two prevalent aesthetics have been fully absorbed into all aspects of pop culture. First came camp, which is—let the late cultural arbiter Susan Sontag remind us—a celebration of "artifice, frivolity, naïve middle-class pretentiousness, and 'shocking' excess."
In an America of uncloseted homosexuality and open fascination with sexual difference and ambiguity—not to mention mountains of self-conscious kitsch and endless celebrity antics—camp theatrics have gone mainstream. They're more eroticized (and at times much deeper, in terms of intellect and social relevance) than when camp seemed to be all about making fun of Tallulah Bankhead and Busby Berkeley. Heaven knows, now anything goes—and a glimpse of some guy in stockings is hardly shocking anymore (or in itself funny).
In terms of drag, some current stage scribes like John Fisher (in his cross-epochal camp-fests like Medea: The Musical) are blithely following in the high-heeled footprints of the great Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and of Ludlam's talented heir, Charles Busch. In another vein, Jordan Harrison's thoughtful comedy Act a Lady takes things further by imagining how the male population of an entire small town becomes beguiled by cross-dressing.
But we're seeing that playwrights don't need switcheroo dress-up to take an arch wink at gender politics. In the well-traveled Pageant Play by Matthew Wilkas and Mark Setlock, two male actors quick-change between the roles of flamboyantly gay child-beauty-contest consultants and butch husbands—demonstrating how little distance there actually is between the two stances.
"Snark" is another commodity entirely, and if not new it's at the least epidemic. Snark is the ironic shrug, the "WTF" text-message, the mocking rejoinder for all occasions, "Whatever...." Snark unmasks hypocrisy, stupidity, squareness. Snark can be a barbed satirical weapon, and/or a shield against societal insanity.
Snark is ubiquitous in current youth culture. Yet in the spirit of Oscar Wilde (who practically invented comedic snark in The Importance of Being Earnest and other farces), it takes on more dimensions when authors pair it with insight, braininess and empathy, in a style we'll call "snark with heart." Heartfelt snark is often a feature of the Generation X and Y family comedy or romantic comedy. And though a vigorous nod is due to more established serio-comic genies like Paula Vogel, Craig Lucas, Christopher Durang, Nicky Silver et al, the current kids on the block are snarky in their own eccentric ways.
Deborah Zoe Laufer's prize-winning End Days, for example, is an update on the nuclear family revolving around a teenage Goth girl with an Elvis-impersonator boyfriend, an unemployed and catatonically depressed father, and a Jewish mom who has a bizarrely personal relationship with Jesus and is actively promoting the Rapture to family and neighbors. Though brined in irony, this bittersweet fable also makes it clear that the teenage daughter's forked tongue and odd drag are means of coping with familial crisis when nothing else has worked.
The best defense is a sarcastic (but not invulnerable) offense, if we're to be persuaded by other young protagonists in comic works by such scribes as Noah Haidle (Mr. Marmalade), Julia Cho (BFE), Jenny Schwartz (God's Ear) and Rolin Jones (The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow). It shouldn't be a surprise that a similar if less fanciful tone is struck on some of today's more interesting TV series and in American independent films. While mocking the Hollywood "dream factory" has been de rigueur for a parade of sharp-fanged humorists from Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman (Once in a Lifetime) to David Mamet (Speed-the-Plow) to Yussef El Guindi (in his recent satire of action-movie stereotyping of Arabs, Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes), most of today's young comedy scribes see no contradiction between stage writing (for love) and screen writing (for rent, and, if they're fortunate, other kinds of artistic gratification).
Living La Vida Surreal
From the 1930s romps of Kaufman and Hart, to the urban angst-fests of Neil Simon, to the post-feminist comedies of manners by Wendy Wasserstein (and sharkier recent ones by Yasmina Reza), most commercially successful theatre comedies take place in a living room. Maybe the action will drift on at some point to a bedroom, or a restaurant, or another character's living room. But young farceurs see no reason to stick to that architectural plan. Many, in fact, are fond of shifting locales to the outer limits of other dimensions.
Jason Grote's Maria/Stuart (based extremely loosely on the Schiller classic of similar title) is nominally set in a (highly dysfunctional) home, but also in an alterna-verse where ghosts deliver cryptic messages to the living, in high German. Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom happens in a carefully prepared bomb shelter, in expectation of an imminent, world-destroying cataclysm just beyond the metal doors.
In Adam Bock's Swimming in the Shallows, it seems perfectly natural that a man falls in love with a shark, and swirls around with him in deep water. In TRAGEDY: a tragedy, by Will Eno, flustered TV news reporters try to rationally report on the sudden onset of eternal darkness; and Ashlin Halfnight, in Artifacts of Consequence, places his oddball survivors and chroniclers of a lost civilization on a submarine.
Surrealism blends with or trumps absurdity, often in oddly familiar, weirdly accessible, everyday sorts of ways. Dreams, ghosts, spirit guides, new planets and planes of existence—it's all kosher now, if the writer is deft enough to make us go there. When the dimension we regularly occupy just isn't enough to contain a writer's whole crazy story, it leaps into the metaphysical—as in Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone, wherein the deceased gentleman of the title shares his last moments of life with us from the beyond. Or as when Christ himself drops in on the beseeching mother in End Days, trying (and largely failing) to chill her out.
And when the agoraphobic protagonist in The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow sends a robot clone of herself on a mission to China to track down her biological parents, do we buy it? Sure. Far stranger things are happening every day, right?
Thanks to the postmodern revolution, comic writers also have license to venture farther afield in hallucinatory zaniness, skipping blithely between cultures, centuries and civilizations, sending up sacred cows of world literature and rocking out. A case in point is Grote's 1001, a dervish of a play that's a free-form adaptation of The Arabian Nights. It swirls between the ancient Middle East and 9/11, with appearances by Queen Scheherazade, novelist Jorge Luis Borges, the mythic Sinbad, superstar Tom Hanks and other pan-epochal celebrities.
As that sly old trickster Borges noted, "I obscure more than I illuminate." And for all of this, thanks goes not only to Borges but to Beckett, to Monty Python and The Matrix, to "Star Trek" and Italo Calvino, to Jung and Xbox fantasy games. Without all of these influences, we theatregoers might still be laughing mainly at cut-ups around coffee tables.
The Infiltration of Improv
Viola Spolin, the Second City, the Committee and the countless theatre games and improv troupes they begat have a lot to answer for. They've not only dominated TV comedy over the past decade, they're also having a potent impact on stage humor.
Comedy improv is, after all, as much about writing funny (even if it's oral writing) as acting funny. But it's also about trusting one's leap-of-faith instincts, loosening up and letting it rip—in effect, developing material by snatching it right out of somebody's mouth.
This certainly isn't a new gambit, but the heartiness of the improv movement and widespread proliferation of improv and sketch-comedy troupes around the country (and on TV, long-running sketch shows like "Saturday Night Live" and "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" and improv-accented series like "The Office" and "Parks and Recreation") has had a direct impact on many young writer-actors who've gone on to theatrical careers.
A case in point: Leading monologist Mike Daisey's early work with his Seattle sketch comedy troupe Up in Your Grill strongly influenced his style of concocting and performing hilarious solo rambles like 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.Com and The Last Cargo Cult. Daisey constantly tries out and injects new material into his pieces to keep things fresh. He usually performs with no scripted text, just a scrawled outline to guide him.
As playwright Jeffrey Sweet points out, Chicago (home of the late improv guru Spolin and the seminal Second City troupe) has numerous improv-based theatres that devise plays using Spolin techniques, including the Annoyance Theatre. Improvisation as an American acting tool goes back to the Group Theatre, but it's now part of the standard curriculum of many academic playwriting and acting programs, and often it's the first portal into the world of theatre for young people—at school, at camp, in after-school drama programs.
Moreover, the sensibility of improv—the rough-and-raunchy, anything-goes, can-you-top-this loosey-goosey-ness—is part of the oxygen younger playwrights breathe as they work. It's part and parcel of many youth-oriented comic musicals of recent vintage, from Urinetown to Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman's Broadway-bound Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.
At its worst, this style of stage humor can be sophomoric and trivial. At its best, it encompasses every hallmark of au courant theatrical comedy mentioned here. Above all, it keeps us laughing with astonishment, horror and relief in hard and bewildering times.
Misha Berson is a theatre critic for the Seattle Times and a frequent contributor to this magazine.
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