Blog Meat! Potatoes! An Adult Evening Of Shel Silverstein opens at The Frequency

It's a rocky time to start up new ventures in the arts, so it's crucial that a new theater company make a good first impression. For The Bricks Theatre, this impression came Wednesday night at The Frequency by way of two tawdry hookers. One of them (Trevin Gay) towered above the potential john (Mark Snowden) and displayed an obvious bit of five o'clock shadow while swapping rhymed barbs with the other (Jess Evans Grimm) prostitute, promising to indulge "any dark perversity, / some masochistic tendency," or even "some special place you'd like to pee."

For the entire 70-minutes-or-so duration of An Adult Evening Of Shel Silverstein, a collection David Mamet assembled from Silverstein's raunchier material on prostitution, death, and grown-up confrontation, the Bricks' inaugural production (running through next Thursday, Oct. 22) rang with all the concise, bouncy mischief of kid-friendly Silverstein poems like "Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too." It's a refreshing challenge to Madison's uppity theater folk and its slovenly comedy folk all at once.

With a cast of just six, the Bricks' production challenges each actor to explore several quick shifts in personality. Peter Hunt came off oddly sympathetic as a talking dog thinking of leaving his blind bluesman friend (Damon Butler) in "Blind Willie And The Talking Dog," then returned as an egotistical jackass in "Thinking Up A New Name For The Act." That skit that tells an entire story using only the words "meat," "and," and "potatoes," and may well be the funniest thing I've ever seen produced on a local stage. Stephanie Robey first appeared as an overly cheery laundry customer in "Wash & Dry," then returned in "New Name" as Hunt's partner in a comically turbulent, yet abusive relationship. Damon Butler grinned his way through "The Best Daddy" like a hyper little Eugene Levy, then switched to the more pitiable bluesman of "Blind Willie": "I thought you were the world's only talking dog friend!"

The Frequency's small music room (you can cram just under 100 people in there) fits this production well; the six short segments make it feel a bit more like a sketch-comedy show than a conventional "play." The venue's bartenders pointed out that this was the first time anyone had built a "set" (really just a false brick wall--get it?) on the small stage. The cast and Bricks' three founders (George Gonzalez, Dave Pausch, and Ric Lantz) quickly switched out the minimal set pieces—a chair here, a ladder there—between segments, and almost as quickly struck the set at the end of the show. There might be a more comfortable way to arrange the room for a theater audience, but the intimacy's essential here: In the final sketch, "Smile," three tough guys (Gay, Snowden, and Butler) bring in Hunt to interrogate him for his role in creating the smiley-face icon and the slogan "have a nice day," but Hunt's back is to the house, so all the aggression gets pointed straight at the crowd.

The cast of this show has to live inside Silverstein's acrobatic celebrations of language, doing just enough with their bodies and faces to capture shifts in mood without creating distraction—Butler and Snowden both gave their eyebrows a workout, for example. For the most part, nobody mugged it up too much, and some Hunt (again, during "New Name") embodied Silverstein's cracked poetry with what I'd almost call athleticism.

I won't sum up the plots of these pieces for you or quote from them any more than I already have. Much of the pleasure comes from the way Silverstein slowly teases the audience into understanding what's actually going on, all while assembling amazing little jungle-gyms of English. The rest of it comes from how clearly this cast has absorbed the precision and concision of Silverstein's writing, and from being packed into The Frequency's small, sweaty music room. An Adult Evening Of Shel Silverstein is too quick, informal, and punchy to tell us what exactly The Bricks Theatre wants to be—"for entertainment purposes only," goes the new company's cagey slogan. Perhaps the Bricks folks mean to take a page from Silverstein: Teasing us along for a bit, and making us like it.