What can a critic say about a show which includes in its program an essay by the performer/creators, informing us that "we seemed to strike the perfect balance between talk and play, philosophy and slapstick? And with a director who boasts a "PhD from Stanford in drama theory and criticism on top of that? all wear bowlers, lowercase letters and all, presents itself as a pre-deconstructed masterpiece that has been “in development 3 years.” Only problem is, it's not very good. One suspects the motive behind the self-congratulatory essay is to prevent the audience from noticing. The central conceit is this: two silent-film comedians tumble off the screen to find themselves in some horrible place they very much want to escape, which also happens to be the theater from which we observe them. Funny thing: I wanted to escape too. At first, the characters try to find a way out; then, for no apparent reason, they do various comic turns. They're silent, then they barely talk, then they talk a lot, then they talk even more and curse a lot. A "perfect balance?" A pretentious mess, propped up by the end with the least vaudevillian comic crutch of all: using various versions of the word "fuck" in practically every speech. Then one of them kills the other, a device to start stealing from existential playwrights, rather than vaudevillians. Then the dead one comes back to life, and they both seem really scared of death. The essay informs us they are informed by Samuel Beckett. Oh. For a piece that has such time and ego invested, the production itself is mystifyingly clueless: The opening minutes, for instance, are an actual silent film starring the two performers. Dressed like Laurel & Hardy, they walk down a country road. They don't have funny or interesting walks, and they don't establish themselves, as all silent-film clowns did, as immediately recognizable types. They just stroll. And that's the problem with all wear bowlers: It's all the structure of a great piece without an ounce of greatness itself.
Trey Lyford, as the Laurel of the two, has undeniable star power and the utter guilelessness to remain riveting throughout the long hour and a half. Geoff Sobelle, on the other hand, while clearly a skillful actor, proves that hard work is not enough: His character, reminiscent of no familiar clowns, is forever over-exercised, which Mr. Sobelle achieves by over-exercising, literally, throughout the production. In a hobo suit on a very cold winter's night, he was bathed in sweat the whole time. Some of the bits work well, such as leaping in and out of the silent film with exquisite timing—but when Mr. Sobelle skips a cartwheel back into the screen (the completion of which we see on film) during the first minutes of the final preview, that illusion is destroyed. Half measures are for high school talent shows, not works of theater.
On other occasions, when stage magic could not be devised to pull off similar effects, the lighting is flashed to blind the audience, a very painful experience for those of us with sensitive eyes. In this age of audience warnings (“there will smoking/gunshots onstage”), no one told me I'd twice experience something more painful than a slap in the face.
Otherwise, classic vaudeville turns are hit or miss. A hyper-long arm bit is done expertly, while the endless eggs-from-the-mouth bit moves so slowly that I now know how to do it myself: the performance is as explicit as a how-to video. All of which leaves the question: Why have mere students of vaudeville created a production that demands expert vaudevillians? The answer is found in the frequent references to foundations and state arts councils in the program: because it got them many, many grants.
