Combat Theatre with Bunny Gumbo

Some of the first new shows of the New Year open this weekend. Some of them also close this weekend. Last night I attended my first of two consecutive evenings of theatre under pressure. It was a pleasant evening just north of downtown on Walnut Street where Bunny Gumbo was opening the first night of its Combat Theatre show. The premise is simple: a series of playwrights take turns picking topics and settings out of a hat. 24 hours later, there’s a show completely off-book complete with props, costuming and other bits of production. Ideally, this produces a kind of vitality not found in regular theatre. The worst-case scenario: it’s painful to sit through.

An audience slowly assembled and shuffled into the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center on Walnut Street. It was a fairly big crowd featuring a respectable number of regular theatergoers—the type of crowd usually seen at a theatre opening with a few additional people. Refreshments in the lobby included brownies, lemon bars and coffee—all $1. Bunny Gumbo-ites milled about the audience persistently hawking raffle tickets (also $1 each) for the evening’s give-away. It was a pleasantly un-pretentious atmosphere. The show started promptly around 8pm . . . Bunny Gumbo’s first 24 hour period was up.

The show consisted of eight shorts. Some of them were pretty good. Some of them weren’t. One or two were exceptionally bad. Here are some highlights:

Seek and Ye Shall Find
Playwright: John Van Slyke
Director: Katie Landa

Subject: Hide and Seek
Setting: A Patent Office

Results: Okay. Van Slyke wasn’t in terribly good form here, but the cast did pretty well with what they were given. The comic potential of a game of hide and seek amongst people whose job it is to go over the nauseatingly minute details of human ingenuity is lost in a short that focuses on some pretty obvious jokes.

To Explore A Strange New . . . Suggestion?
Playwright: Michael John Moynihan
Director: Tom Reed

Subject: A Suggestion Box
Setting: The Starship Enterprise

Results: Pretty bad, but the audience seemed okay with it. This was, for the most part a bad Star Trek spoof that only occasionally went for a joke that wasn’t painfully obvious. Gene Roddenberry’s fabulously over-rated long-running piece of pop-cultural sci-fi hack-work never seems to get the kind of ridicule it truly deserves. The acting in this short was pretty good, though. Bo Johnson put in clever performance doing a pretty authentic impression of Brent Spiner as Data.

Where There’s A Swill, There’s A Sway
Playwright: Michael Duncan
Director: Dennis Johnon

Subject: Children’s Theatre
Location: Masked Ball

Results: Okay. And there were a few really good lines. Duncan managed a relatively interesting script with the idea of a theatrical performance gone wrong. Usually trying to deliberately capture the comedy of bad performance doesn’t work. It didn’t really work here either, but it was fun anyway thanks to a good cast.

Ballet Lambeau No. 3-19

Playwright: Randy Rehberg
Director: John Maclay

Subject: A Dream Ballet
Location: Lambeau Field

Results: Kind of unexpected. Rehberg shows a talent for writing solid comedy in this short, even if he dropped the ball on an opportunity to do something truly original. The piece muddles through the usual Packer fan comedy shtick before settling into a remarkably well-choreographed dance theatre interpretation of a football game. If choreographer/Milwaukee Ballet Artistic Director Michael Pink coached the Packers, it might look something like this. The less original portions of the script were aided by the strategically overwhelming cuteness of Amy Geyser along with the shrewd comedic timing of Dan Katula, Paul Helm and Lee Becker. Oddly enough, the short took place in some strange parallel dimenson where the Packers will play the Cowboys in the NFC Championshp game at Lambeau Field and not Texas Stadium.

Till Death

Playwright: Anthony Wood
Director: Angela Iannone

Subject: A Mortician
Location: A Fashion Show

Results: Exactly what you might expect out of a combat theatre dream team like Wood and Iannone. Over the course of the evening, each of the directors introduced their work on the show. When Iannone (a very accomplished actress) took the stage for the purposes of introduction, her natural stage presence was palpable. The piece itself showed Anthony Wood’s natural talents as a seasoned comic playwright. The man who wrote A Cudahy Caroler Christmas was in top form here, telling a Romeo and Juliet-like tale of a mortician in love with a Ukrainian model at a mortuary convention in Las Vegas. One of the better pieces of the evening.

Cha-Cha Slide

Playwright: Michelle Hoffman
Director: Heidi Mueller Smith

Subject: Dance Lessons
Location: Recess

Results: A talented group of actors including Stephan Roselin, Ted Tyson, Chris Klopatek and Amie Losi gave life to an otherwise uninspired coming of age script. There isn’t much worth mentioning here, but it WAS kind of fun.

Faisel: No Simple Agent Provocateur

Playwright: Steven Midthun
Director: Jeremy Woods

Subject: A Terrorist
Location: A fertility clinic

Results: Obviously, there’s a lot of comic potential here. This one wasn’t quite as good as might’ve been expected with what Midthun was given. A generic Middle-Eastern terrorist marches a man into a fertility clinic with only the most obvious jokes making it to the stage. In today’s world there are a million reasons for terrorism—why limit the short to a Middle Eastern terrorist? This one was pretty fun in spite of the script.

Elves Bake Cookies Inside Tree

Playwright: Patrick Holland
Director: Maretes Hein

Subject: Jealousy
Location: The Keebler Elves’ Factory

Results: Relatively entertaining. Robert W.C. Kennedy starred as a jealous Ernie Keebler giving an employee review to a slacker elf played by Doug Jarecki. One of the best bits of the evening because it actually featured a substantial amount of subtlety in the script that the actors could work with.

At the end of the show, raffle prizes were given out and playwrights drew slips for the second evening of the show. The single best subject/location pairing drawn from the hats last night had to be Anthony Wood’s—Narcolepsy on Noah’s Ark. Wood’s piece joins seven others at tonight’s second evening of Combat Theatre with Bunny Gumbo. A member of the Blue Man Group joins the show tonight as well.

I move on to another venue tonight: The Alchemist Theatre. They are presenting BERZERK!!!—a combat theatre-style program brought to the stage by local DIY guys Alamo Basement and Insurgent Theatre. BERZERK!!! is combat theatre with a shorter attention span. The show features plays that were written in ten minutes. While Alamo Basement and Insurgent Theatre will not be welcoming a guest from the Blue Man Group, the Alchemist Theatre on South Kinnickinnic does feature a well-stocked bar. Both shows start at 8pm tonight. BERZERK!!! is sold out. By the time this gets posted, there’s a good chance the second evening of the Bunny Gumbo show may be sold out as well . . .