Clown and Punishment

Clowns – happy, bouncy, balloon toting clowns – are scary. There may be a lifetime of insistently smiling faces at the circus trying to argue otherwise, but in “Not Clown,” the Austin-based Physical Plant Theater confronts this hard, grease-painted truth. The Soho Rep hosts the touring Texan production, and though many of the company’s biggest gags go splat, they still open jaded New York eyes to the possibility that theater might, just might, excel elsewhere in America.Steve Moore and Carlos Trevino’s knockabout horror-comedy imagines a near future in which clowns have so terrified the establishment that buffoonery has been outlawed. Some clowns are packed off (literally, and painfully, into their own suitcases) to Latvia, while others dodge horrifying doctors and police raids. In a play within the play, the clowns act out these past persecutions. But even in their “well-funded” return from exile, courtesy of a non-clown blonde (Elizabeth Doss), the clowns must battle civilian domination.The first third of “Not Clown” is largely wordless. After an apologetic introduction by Ms. Doss, who portrays the play’s playwright as well as underwriter, the clowns literally tumble into a series of short comic bits. Even if the play weren’t set in the future, these would already be old, from the “levitation” trick to Keystone Kops-style chases. But as they progress, the skits, in which the actors shriek with laughter nearly nonstop, grow darker, eventually acting out the grotesque tortures the clowns survived.The complicated, triple-layered dramaturgy, in which we see the clowns playing their “human” counterparts (in turn scripted into a still larger piece), succeeds. But the metanarrative twists come too late. The clowning, which ought to morph from delightful to scarifying, starts out totally nightmarish. (One poor audience member was roundly humiliated by a clown before the show even started: Their pleas for our sympathy must have been falling on at least one pair of irritated ears.)Even though the Soho Rep proves to be an inhospitable Big Top – the cast could barely goose a giggle out of the audience the night I attended – the company still leaves an impressive mark. Lee Eddy is both the most successful clown and the most able naturalist; she makes a mini-masterpiece out of “breaking character.” And the rail-thin Josh Meyer makes an extremely poignant victim, even while sporting a squishy red nose. Perhaps with a sprightlier audience, these Texas imports would have met with the same kind of adoring reception they enjoy back home. But on Friday night in New York, they got tossed to the lions.***Another response this weekend that was chillier than it could have been: the theatergoers at P.S. 122 watching “Sinner” by the physical theater group Stan Won’t Dance. Chilly, because the only proportional response would have been rushing the stage, leaping on the performers, and pounding them enthusiastically on the back. Stan Won’t Dance, formed by former members of the now legendary British group DV8, devised what they call a “self-destructive duet,” a physically daunting blend of constant dance and text that creates sustained moments of genuine terror and suspense. Performed by Liam Steel, one of the company’s artistic directors, and Ben Wright, who originated the role of the Prince in Matthew Bourne’s “Swan Lake,” “Sinner” is 70 minutes of theatrical breathlessness.The stage swirls with fog, a few sidelights piercing the mist, and dozens of chairs seem frozen mid-explosion. Fragments of furniture hang suspended from the ceiling, or sit imbedded in one of the space’s many columns. Incredibly, there is just enough space in all the mayhem for Messrs. Steel and Wright to flip and twist around each other – just dodging all the flotsam would tax most actors. But since Ben Payne’s spare, funny, searing script deals with the 1999 Soho bomber, whose nail bombs killed three men in a gay bar, the play needs to seem like an eruption in process.Robert (Mr. Steel) alternates between painful timidity and a horrible twitchy nervousness; Mr. Wright picks him up (both literally and at the club) with creepy ease. Their movement style, choreographed by Mr. Steel and Rob Tannion, has the low center of gravity of contact improv, the sort of shifting and weight-sharing that may seem familiar from capoeira. It’s appropriately combative – though both men seem to glide over each other, it still seems unsafe to spend so much time balancing on another person’s hip. In fact, by the time one of the men revealed himself as the bomber, it almost seemed unnecessary to see his bag explode.

Clown and Punishment

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