Sometimes you’re in the mood for theatre. Sometimes you just want a beer on a Monday night. Or, you can get both at Goodbye Blue Monday, a Bushwick bar that ironically offered pretty lame Monday nights until the Undiscovered Countries Festival took up residence there (more about this incredible festival later). A week ago Monday, I caught this month’s installment of the festival: one of playwright/performer Taylor Adamson’s new plays, The Cyclops. The casual, though fully-staged reading was everything I would’ve expected from a goofy, weeknight show-at-a-bar, yet Adamson would never let an audience off that easy- not even a drunk one.
First of all, Taylor Adamson will never cater to an audience of lazy listeners. He requires an effort of attention that few writers demand anymore; even I fell short of the challenge. Adamson lands one intricately detailed image, one pop culture reference, one joke, one insult after another with no useless repetition or exposition, and if you missed that line: well, it was funny and important, too bad. Secondly, this playwright has a Merriam-Webster vocabulary which he knows how to use and will use, a phenomenon sadly lost in our TV-over-books generation. Adamson floats through the English language with uncommon fluency, smacking phrases like “all up in this bitch” next to Shakespeare quotes, and generally outwriting many of his contemporaries who, for some reason, fail to employ juicy, complex, thought-provoking, many-syllabled Words.
Adamson has also created his own interesting derivative of the too-familiar Brechtian awareness-of-the-theatre. A character calls for ‘line’ when he’s caught short of something to say. Another whines about being killed off before she has done anything significant in the script. Adamson uses this familiar trope not only to blur the line between ‘play’ and ‘life,’ but to poke fun at theatre-making itself, to mock bad writing, the process of making a show, and even himself as an artist, lending yet an extra layer of seriocomic self-consciousness to his text.
The one catch to most Adamson plays is their length. If not their actual length (The Cyclops wasn’t all that long), then their sense of it. While some scenes shoot jokes and wisdom like lightning blots, others feel as though they could lose 3 or 4 pages. Sometimes it’s silly moments that seem to have turned from comedy to inside joke. In other scenes, characters preach pedantically about the themes of the play. Through a couple of these huge speeches, I gleaned something about god and our country, something about church and state maybe that I guess I tuned out after a while. But that’s not to say that some of the themes of The Cyclops didn’t hit home; in fact, I think this satire of American culture was particularly sneaky.
“This is not a Greek satyr play. This is a goddamn All-American satyr play,” reads the program. And that statement couldn’t be more accurate. The Cyclops is truly about the American ‘satyr,’ the bigoted, violent, horny, drunken, foul-mouthed (sorry:) man. We’re used to seeing these characters ridiculed: in ‘bro movies,’ on sitcoms, etc. And The Cyclops obviously joined in the fun, costuming these familiar good-for-nothing dudes in thick, furry shorts complete with giant, erect phallises. But in true Adamson style, though you may laugh for 90 minutes, he’ll slam you at the end, and this he does once again. Adamson himself, an actor in his own play, sits on the edge of the stage at the end of the piece, now devoid of any character but his own. He talks to the audience (much of which, he knows, are friends of his) about alcohol, giving a brief, intensely honest discourse on his relationship to the substance, which he admits he does not drink. Taylor’s speech makes me realize, beer in hand, that while we laugh at caricatures of the lazy, American, alcoholic renegade, there is a certain identification behind our laughter, and even a certain self-conscious approval. That is the touchy realm of American culture in which this play bravely dwells: the drunken, shallow, terrified part of ourselves that hides its vulnerability behind crude humor and a mug of beer.
This production of The Cyclops, under Joel Grossman’s direction, was pragmatic and clear, and the performances enjoyable. Brian Mason’s and Jason Cohen’s music was goofy and catchy, but they also inadvertently wrote a bluesy gem of a song that seemed just thrown in near the end. The chorus, which started “Gimme, gimme, gimme the girl who don’t want me,” was a rousing jam that had the audience clapping without prompt. Mason invited the audience to sing the last chorus and almost everyone did. There we were, a whole crowd of people joyously singing together about unrequited love and how much it sucks; that, folks, is a quality moment of theatre, and rare. The song was made entirely more awesome by Mason’s gritty, earnest rock vocals which made an appearance just once for this song, but were awesome nonetheless.
So each performer may have had a shining moment here or there. Yet, no one can perform Taylor Adamson’s text quite like Taylor Adamson himself. Somehow no one else can master equally the fully-committed slapstick, completely flat line delivery, and moments of intense depth and truth that are all called for in Adamson’s plays. Typically, his actors are masters of well-delivered comedy, but no one in this production was as able to dig deep as the playwright himself. It is that moment I always wait for in Adamson’s performances, the moment when the humor is stripped away, when he sits before the audience under no guise but some pre-written words, talking earnestly about the pain we daily ignore. No acting. No laughing. Just him.
Check out Adamson’s next big deal in San Francisco (ooo!): his uproariously funny play, Robot Hand, produced by Bigger Than a Breadbox Theatre Company this coming season.
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