BOUFFON GLASS MENAJOREE

BOUFFON GLASS MENAJOREE
This is high stakes, take-no-prisoners, in your face, screamingly funny, shockingly repulsive, undeniably powerful theatre at its most inspired, smart, and enlightened. You better exit the Wingfields house through the set-piece door because even a momentary lapse in illusion could cost you your “stabber.”

I have never seen anything quite like this in my life. Ever.

What a trio! This was a true jazz fest! A feast of solo virtuosic riffs interspersed amid transcendent group orchestration. The actors are as pitch perfect in their individual performances as they are as an ensemble. To play to extremis on a dime, without losing your credibility or humor is genius acting. And these three actors are genius. So is the direction. Davis has struck a perfect balance between the grotesque and the absurd, and though there are certainly moments that are repulsive, they are never offensive, or in bad taste. Perhaps because he has chosen to punctuate this world with moments of spot-on physical and verbal choreography, we are continually reminded that we are in the hands of artists, and so never far from the sublime.

Bouffon so often sags under the weight of its social commentary, or righteous indignation at the affronteries it is lampooning, that it loses its buoyance and becomes a pedantic harangue we can hardly bear to watch. But there is nothing heavy in this grotesque world. And so we watch it. Lap it up. Let it in. How else do we sit happily watching Laura in a hospital johnny wearing nothing but adult Pampers and nipple cups, ( or whatever you call whatever those were), and changing her crippled leg from right to left with an impunity that’s as funny as it is startling. Or mother, for whom tidying up for the guests means to sweep all the dreck down between your voluminous breasts, eat a stick of butter, smear it on your chest, and slap your daughter around a little, while brother challenges the audience to give him a blow job and then humps his sister.

Why would anyone do this to an American masterpiece? Because, as Walter Kerr once wrote: “Comedy scratches freely [in public] in order to add the last necessary ounce of truth.” It’s probably best we keep those truths to ourselves ..which is why it sure feels good, and right, to laugh about them in a crowd of fellow scratchers .. or, to again quote Kerr, “boobs of a feather.”

And the Gentleman Caller! Let’s just say that this is the best audience participation show I have ever been to. Jim should always be a volunteer (volunteer? maybe, hostage is more accurate) from the audience. What better way to underscore the difference in worlds. And the awkwardness of a first date. The abiding image for me from the production, and the one which feels like a perfect metaphor for our experience of the production, is of Jim, the Gentleman Caller ringing the “doorbell.” Standing obediently with his index finger outstretched, as instructed by the lascivious, deliriously repulsive and hysterically funny “Tom”, he pumps it back and forth through the little “o” which Tom has made with his own index finger and thumb. “Jim’s” disgust that he is doing this is surpassed only by his disbelief which in turn is surpassed only by his delight .. and which again is surpassed only by ours!

My god! These guys did exactly as they cautioned they would: “If you go with us, there’s no going back!” No going back? Yippee! Who wants to? This is the true Menagerie! We recognize this family as our own … with the lid, and the music off. I’m ruined. I never want to see a ‘normal’ production of Glass Menagerie again.