Blunt Objects Theatre: punk, puppets, masks, and tomatoes

A self-described “loose collective of theatre-freaks,” Connecticut’s Blunt Objects Theatre lives up to its name, challenging audiences with a heady, sometimes confrontational mix of “punk, puppets, masks, and tomatoes.” (The group actually encourages audiences to throw the latter at them.) The idea is to break the wall between observer and participant—or at least blur the line a little—but it’s all done in a playful, often funny way incorporating elements of slapstick, improvisation, and Brechtian epic theatre. On Wednesday, the group visits The Borg Ward with its original production Apocalypse Lost, which tells the story of a Gulf War veteran with two slaves in his basement and a hideously deformed son who decides to rescue them. The A.V. Club met with Blunt Objects co-founder Tom Foran about interactive theater and getting the audience to mosh with the performers.

The A.V. Club: Many people hate interactive theater because they’d rather just watch. How do you get people over that trepidation?

Tom Foran: It’s a natural hatred, I think. I can understand where it comes from, but it's totally unfounded. When you go to a punk show, are you one of the people who stands in the back with your arms crossed the whole time, or do you jump into the fray and lose your sense of self for a while? It's really what you make it. So what we've tried to incorporate is an appeal to the absolute most cynical audience member, like the guy whose girlfriend dragged him to this stupid fucking puppet musical thing. We let him throw things at us, we talk to him and break the fourth wall and acknowledge that a lot of this is stupid. Then we might win him over.

AVC: Your rhetoric is aggressively anti-authoritarian. Do you exhort your audience to rise up against The Man, so to speak?

TF: There is a distinct protest vein to the whole thing, but more in a satirical view of the way our reality is. We lampoon more than we hurl Molotovs. Which could make us impotent bourgeois losers, maybe.

AVC: You also scream a lot, right?

TF: We do. We've gotten some feedback that we scream a bit too much, so we're working on scaling it back a bit.

AVC: What's the best thing your audience could do, from your perspective?

TF: We want them to mosh with us! Get up and take the stage with us.

AVC: Why not just form a punk band instead?

TF: Because a punk band should be just that, a group of punks banding together. 
Punk is not what you do, it's how you do it.