Geek Love
at the Lunar Cabaret
The Rhino Fest opened with Geek Love, Theater for the Age of Gold’s musical adaptation of the cult novel about a family of circus freaks. I can’t assess the faithfulness of the adaptation since I haven’t read Katherine Dunn’s book, but the play all too faithfully presents a version of the world that’s rank, pointless, and repulsive. From the cacophonous entrance music to the hideous paper sunflowers decorating the stage, this production is designed from the start to make your skin crawl. Each of the gruesome puppets, manipulated by Eric Emert, displays his fingers through its mouth hole, producing both a disgustingly realistic tongue and nervous laughter in the audience.
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The piece begins with one of these puppets berating us in the voice of cocreator Jeff Dorchen: “What are you doing here?” This is Artie, the fish-boy son of a circus family whose father grew tired of breeding roses and began to breed freaks instead. Artie, who lives in an aquarium, expresses his hatred of everyone by leading a cult that ritually amputates the limbs of “normal” people, who apparently volunteer. (Playing the Transmigrating Narrative Identity, Amy Warren says, “The normal is always to be pitied somehow.”) The violence escalates from there, as we learn in song, narrative, and slide show how Artie masterminds the rape of his sisters, conjoined twins, followed by the beheading of one of them and cannibalistic consumption of the remains.
After the overripeness and clutter of the Geek Love stage, it was a relief to see the relative bareness–a blanket spread out, a circle of books–for Barrie Cole’s Something Made Up. And after Geek Love’s multiple mutilations, a child’s pretense of amputation by repeatedly concealing and displaying her arm while yelling “boom!” seems fairly benign.
Identifying with Jesus, Ned–played by Danne W. Taylor with a combination of insight and doltishness, affection and petulance, so perfect that he could rent himself out as the ideal pet–looks forward to Good Friday and some serious time on the cross to restore his ability to change. But as the disconsolate Alice observes, “Every day is Good Friday if you work in fast food.” Eventually she blossoms, however, with no help more otherworldly than Ned’s and Mitzi’s friendship and her own dawning sense of being able to reciprocate.
