GOING UNDERGROUND: Caris in You’re Eating God. |
Painting/Eating [Aug 2 8 pm]
Two one-act monologues, written by their actors and directed by Lowry Marshall, share the same bill and try to outdo each other in comical inventiveness. The first, Zoë Chao’s The Kitchen Painting, centers around a woman’s obsession with pulling off an art heist.Several other characters spin off of that premise, most prominently a nervous guard recruited as a partner in crime, though first choice would have been someone “with a really cool getaway car.” The clever scheme involves creating several false alarms so the security system will seem to be malfunctioning, but the climax ends up being even smarter than that.
The set-up allows Chao to inhabit as many characters as possible, and the reluctant guard is only one of them. Chao puts on a Parisian accent as a self-impressed ballet dancer from a Degas painting, engaging in rehearsal hall banter as she bluffs about why she hasn’t been cast in Giselle. For contrast, the next character is a hunched, blind old man in a Breughel painting, one of several being led along in a medieval setting; she’s taking her situation in stride, and her closing query — “Does anybody know where we’re going?” — could be seen as reflecting the state of mind of our art thief. So could the aspiring prima donna and others depicted in other paintings we see in the target museum.
But the playlet strays from that possible thematic focus and becomes just a fun opportunity for Chao to try on the personalities of some pretentious art world types and prominent art industry figures. For a while she is Leo Castelli, Manhattan art gallery impresario, being interviewed for a documentary, and then she is Ileana Sonnabend, his ex-wife and rival gallery owner. Chao has more fun, and so do we, when she presents a couple before an abstract painting, waxing pretentious as they project onto the canvas meanings more real to them than the paint.
Rachel Caris’s You’re Eating God takes us back to the 1960s and down into the fallout shelter of the Sweeneys. It was built and is being defended by Dick, a jaw-thrusting patriarch in the tradition of General Patton, and perhaps of Roman defenders of barbarians at the gates. Back then the barbarians were, of course, the Ruskies, and Dick takes his responsibility seriously. He tells his family that this is going to be only a two-week trial, but he locks them in down there for months. They don’t even have Groundhog Day to look forward to for a peek out.
The patience of family members varies. Smiling, apron-uniformed mother Madge has stashed away an unread copy of Family Circle: “That way I’d have a little treat during the nuclear war.” Grandma Winnie wonders if Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben are married, with rice and syrup perhaps being a traditional Negro dish. Grandpa is in a wheelchair, mute, grinning suspiciously.
Fuming daughter Peggy refuses to put up with this, tinkering with her radio, trying to turn it into a ham broadcasting station to get a help message out to her boyfriend, Ivan Nussbaum. Her brother, Dicky, is the most delightfully over-the-top character here, the horniest adolescent since Philip Roth’s Portnoy, a sputtering, pressurized hiss of steaming hormones and incestuous lust.
