Brett Neveu’s artistic mission is simple: ruin everything. He’s been ruining puppetry with his “adult-themed puppet show,” The Pup At Theatre: Hidden Surprise Shows, which has been produced at a half-dozen venues around town since premiering at Sheffield’s five years ago. Neveu and sidekick Eric C. Johnson pull a few dozen ratty puppets from cardboard boxes and put them through pointless skits lacking any imagination whatsoever, barking their lines in a series of unconvincing voices. It’s one of the stupidest, most hysterical hours you can spend in a theater.
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Now Neveu’s out to ruin improv with a new, fully improvised disaster, The Pup At Theatre: P.Imps. Show. And where better to start than at improv’s holiest of holy shrines–Second City. For April Fool’s Day, a friend invited Neveu and his four fellow “puppeteers”–Johnson, Stephanie Frey, Megan Gogerty, and Doug Steckel–to do excerpts from P.Imps. as special guests to cap off a late-night main-stage show. “It sounded like a good idea,” Neveu says with a nervous laugh, “except, given the nature of the show, which is to try to ruin things–well, we didn’t set out to do that, because I didn’t want to jeopardize my friendship.”
“People started laughing,” Neveu says, “but after a while–not so much laughing. The laughs only came from the cheap seats in the back.” Midway through the next skit, people started leaving.
Neveu’s not just a bad puppeteer: he’s been a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists since 1997. But aside from the occasional ten-minute one-act produced at some small festival or other, none of his plays have ever seen the light of day here. “I don’t worry about it,” he says. “The Pups keep me balanced. I spend a lot of time working on plays, rewriting, but I know the Pups work. I can always come back to them.”
–Justin Hayford
