WILBUS AMADEUS CROAKLEY, Giants in the Sky Productions, at Second City, Donny’s Skybox Studio, and MY UNCLE’S FAVORITE DISH IS CASHEW CHICKEN…NO NUTS, Stir-Friday Night!, at Second City, Donny’s Skybox Studio. I do believe Jason Flowers is insane. I mean that in the best possible sense. A student at Second City’s Training Center (as I am), he’s not content to do what earlier improvisers have done. Following his own eccentric comic muse, he sometimes looks so out of sync with his fellow players that it seems he’s been digitally pasted into a scene. And judging from Wilbus Amadeus Croakley Flowers’s writing eludes categorization as well. While he draws on improv’s satiric tradition, this hour-long comedy, which he also directs, is more than just another improv-based play. Mixing genres with promiscuous glee, it reads at times like broad parody–like Forrest Gump, Croakley, who’s half white and half black, stumbles into key moments in history: he meets the Black Panthers in Oakland, lands on the moon before Neil Armstrong, and trips at Woodstock. But it also has naturalistic comic scenes, as well as Monty Python-esque silliness.
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–Jack Helbig
