Even the most mechanical side-splitters on the stage are uplifting somehow. That's not the best argument for the reality of the spiritual life, but there it is. And it could be the path to insights generally not afforded to us this side of the grave. John Gay, whose "Beggar's Opera" deflated the fad for opera in Georgian England and who knew a thing or two about tickling the public ribs, summed it up in this epitaph couplet:
Life's a jest, and all things show it.
I thought so once, and now I know it.
My debut at the 2022 Indianapolis Theatre Fringe Festival consisted of two adjacent productions on Indy Fringe's two home stages on St. Clair Street: "Tortillo 3: Sombrero's Revenge" and "Breakneck Comedy of Errors." Each production tends to highlight Gay's declared belief, as well as his after-death supposition that the ultimate truth is a joke.
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Tim Mooney: A man of many words and hats
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Let's look first at Tim Mooney's latest installation in his "Breakneck" series. Here he crams Shakespeare plays into an hour each, knitted facilely together by a combination of narration and the fast-paced assumption of roles from his well-studied sources. If this can amount to tweaking your education for a blithe hour, the series also earns its place as captivating entertainment perfect for our era of shortened attention spans.
Well-remembered for his hell-bent-for-leather Fringe versions of "Hamlet" (2015) and the history plays (2021), this time Mooney is a stowaway aboard the Bard's maiden voyage, a revised Latin tale of mistaken identity on steroids briskly titled "The Comedy of Errors."
It's helpful both to assess this virtuoso's achievement and its possible shortcomings by recalling the scholar Harold Goddard's reminder that the near-farcical, Latin-derived play is an example of pure theater — insofar as there's nothing to ponder about depth of character or fate and everything to take in as wind-up action focused on an ever-shifting now. "Present mirth hath present laughter," as Shakespeare reminds us in "Twelfth Night," a play of subtler complications.
Theater puts us above our everyday confusions and misunderstandings to allow us to revel in contrived ones. "For a brief interval, theater allows us to become gods," wrote Goddard, who was surely mindful of his name's punning force. The action remains below us, and any clarification for the people involved must await resolution until the last act. God-like, the audience is in on the joke from the start.
The disadvantage of Mooney's format as applied to "The Comedy of Errors" is that the radical suspension of disbelief the show requires can be exercised only in a staged version, with its multiple players and the merely approximate resemblance within two sets of twins. No matter how doubled the costumes of the two Dromios and two Antipholuses, we have to accept that the lack of mirrored identity is not apparent to the characters thrown together in Ephesus.
What "Breakneck Comedy of Errors" celebrates best is Mooney's deft balancing of action that's deliberately out of balance. Slight but telling vocal shifts (thank goodness he doesn't ascend into falsetto for female characters!) and an array of headgear donned and doffed flawlessly toss the hot potato around the dramatis personae.
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Sombrero declares his devotion to snacks.
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The audience may not be as in on the joke of "Tortillo 3: Sombrero's Revenge," unless it is familiar with the first two episodes of "Tortillo." I'll admit to being a newcomer to the series, which burst out from Catalyst Repertory in the Indy Fringe Festival of six years ago. Casey Ross is writer and director of this manic fantasy involving jealousy and ambition in the corner of the corporate world involving the manufacture of snack foods.
"Tortillo" repeatedly touches on the real world, even if such touches are more like groping and goosing. The cast spins like whirligigs around the story of contamination of the compulsively eatable product by cocaine. Not that the list of ingredients properly on the package adheres to the dictates of health, as one of the play's fly-by shots has it. The characters bring their own demons into the mix. In the tradition of farce, such desirable qualities as "work-life balance" are jokes according to the John Gay standard.
The costuming is imaginative and character-driven. The cast has its command of Ross' rousing script honed to a fine point. In common with the requirements of farce — perhaps this is part of what we look like to the gods that Goddard alludes to — characters are always just there when they have to be. Entrances and exits have an automatic rightness and inevitability.
The pacing and intensity never let up. Paroxysms of violence and desperation, orotund passions and petty kvetching alike are trotted out with hyperbolic gestures and facial expressions, probably inspired by the animator's art.
The red-suited figure at the end, who had earlier carried a bass guitar like his namesake John Entwistle of The Who, returns with a mop, swishing the characters aside. He may represent an unlikely return to order, just as Puck in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" does as his show closes down, saying "I am sent with broom before / To sweep the dust behind the door." The dust of controlled substances hangs in the air, however, just as the riotous action of "Sombrero's Revenge" does in the memory — and in the audience's temporary confidence that life is indeed a jest.
["Tortillo" photo by Indy Ghost Light]
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