Delphine Veaudor
Thanksgiving Breakdown
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| Alien Comic Tom Murrin plays George Bush in "What We Have to be Thankful For," the "Appetizer Course" of "Butt-Crack Bingo" at La MaMa E.T.C. |
"Butt-Crack Bingo"
La MaMa E.T.C. (The Club), 74A East Fourth Street
Through November 30
Thu-Sat at 10:00 pm, Sun at 5:30 pm
Reviewed by Delphine Veaudor Nov 23.
A vague nausea and some surfacing familial animosities are quite usual at the end of a Thanksgiving Day. It is less common having your drunken aunt on the verge of vomiting on your carpet and complaining that her husband has more sex with his children than with herself. Yet it is not very surprising that Tom Murrin, alias Jack Bump, alias Alien Comic--a specialist in "bad taste sex comedies," chose to depict that second version of a Thanksgiving Day in his provocative "Who'll Carve The Turkey?," part of a three-part evening named "Butt Crack Bingo." "Who'll Carve the Turkey" is the "main course" of the evening, coming in between a solo turn by the Alien Comic himself and "The Rehearsal," another short play by Jack Bump. All three are directed by David Soul and playing until November 30 in The Club at La MaMa.
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WHO'LL CARVE THE TURKEY? -- Jeff Biehl, Jibson Frazier and Laura Kindred.
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"Who'll Carve The Turkey?" is about a supposedly traditional American family, whose children dress up as Puritans and whose Thanksgiving day turns into a bad taste disaster, highlighting the very dark side of a certain middle-class cliché. When Daughter Dorothy (played by the very convincing Laura Kindred) starts fluttering in a very lewd way on her Dad's knees while her mother is out of the room, you feel that something is going really wrong within Mr. and Ms. Perfect's lovely home. Things are not going to get better when Uncle Harry, Aunt Mabel and their excited children walk in to share the turkey: Aunt Mabel's hostess gift consists of a bottle of liquor intended to be consumed exclusively by her. The rest of the play is a series of domestic disasters ending with a nice (and apparently usual) collective sex party between the children and their fathers. "God bless the American family" is what ironically occurs to you at the end of the play.
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| Eve Udesky and Brian Bickerstaff in Jack Bump's "The Rehearsal." |
The satire works mainly thanks to Gibson Frazier and April Sweeney's performances. They play a Mad Magazine-type couple who are "typically American" but whose vices and neuroses surface the whole play long. This is cynically delighting.
One of the reasons why you heartily enjoy this anti-Puritan play is perhaps because it is well set up by the "appetizer" which was offered in the first part of the evening by the Alien Comic. Your first reaction might be to think that it must be very weird being in the Alien Comic's head, wherein lie a messy blend of political cogitations, jokes of unequal quality, and sexual obsessions. What surfaces onstage is a frenetic visual representation of those thoughts by the use of numerous hand-made props. And it is, surprisingly enough, very funny to see this 60-something man in a red jogging suit giving his opinions on both George Bush's policies and the meaning of Thanksgiving. It is surprising because the Alien Comic's humor is not subtle and delicate at all. But that is the point: the Alien Comic and his evil soulmate, Jack Bump, remind you that you still like the dirty jokes which made you guiltily laugh when you were a child. The good thing is that now you have the right to laugh frankly, provided you do not mind sullying your reputation as an intellectual person.
But dirty humor has its limits and is far less enjoyable when it is not accompanied by some deeper considerations. "The Rehearsal," presented as the "dessert," is gratuitously dirty. It is sometimes better stopping before the dessert in order to avoid indigestion. [dv]
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