Tonight we had the thrill of going to Mesa Community College's Theatre Outback to catch a brilliant performance of Bert V. Royal's breakout hit from the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival, the triumphantly raunchy Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead.
Directed with masterly precision by James Rio and featuring a standout cast of young actors, this joyously raunchy parody features the Peanuts comic strip characters fast-forwarded to the kind of angsty teendomseen in the smartest high school movies and TV shows dating back to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Heathers, and Dawson's Creek, only with sharper wit and a lot more exhilarating uses of the F word.
Born in 1951, we were part of the generation that grew up on the daily adventures of good ol' Charlie Brown and his crew, spending childhood allowance money on the series of collected strips in paperback. As we grew up, we devoured The Gospel According to Peanuts, A Charlie Brown Christmas and its TV sequels with the iconic Vince Guaraldi music; the upbeat and winsome Broadway musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown (our first girlfriend in college played Snoopy in a Brooklyn high school version in 1970; we didn't see her, but our second and third girlfriends and some random boyfriends did and said she was great); the stuffed animals (our little bro, ten years younger, dragged around a dirty plush beagle for years); the Hallmark greeting cards (easiest thing for parents' birthdays); MetLife commercials and ads -- until finally we were fucking sick of the pint-sized neurotics and their nauseatingly whimsical pets.
Later, of course, we realized Schultz's genius and could appreciate him anew in the current millennium. As our friend, the filmmaker and novelist Brian Pera wrote us in October 2001, weeks after 9/11:
I've been reading a lot of Charles Schulz lately. Maybe that explains the nagging despair. Read a book of interviews with him and a wonderful collection of his strips just put out. I hadn't realized how wonderful they are, I'm ashamed to say. What an amazing man. So simple and touching, and really deep for it all.
Dog Sees God is a sly, dark, extremely funny transformational use of Peanuts, and in sure hands -- as it is in this production of the Mesa Community College Department of Theatre & Film Arts -- the play manages to work perfectly. 
The director modulates the action so that the actors, in particular the perfectly-cast Diondre Price as the endearingly stolid, questioning (in more than one sense of the word), frustrated linchpin of a group of teenagers dealing with more "issues" than in a zillion After School Specials, effectively conquer the script's most nagging problem: how to reconcile the highly funny, vulgar and knowing pop social satire with the topical gruesome melodrama (prefiguring Tyler Clementi) and search for meaning engendered by the death of a beloved object, be it boy or dog.
The best our generation could do to defile the once-ubiquitous Peanuts-inspired slogan "Happiness is a warm puppy" was change the two P's in puppy to double-S (and there's a lot, and we mean a lot, of hilarious talk -- and even singing -- about pussy in this show). But as Dog Meets God opens, the dog's no longer even lukewarm: C.B.'s beloved beagle has expired of rabies, having dismembered and killed his little yellow bird companion in his crazed death throes. So much for peace, love, Woodstock, flowers.
As someone who worked as a staff attorney at a think tank researching tons of intellectual property issues, we admire how deftly the playwright and his initial producers' high-powered lawyers managed to avoid lawsuits from United Features Syndicate and the Schultz estate by advising the oblique but still-obvious references to characters who will be copyrighted and probably trademarked for decades to come. So Charlie Brown is C.B., Linus (Van Pelt) is Linus, Sally Brown and Lucy are C.B.'s Sister and Van's Sister; Peppermint Patty and Marcie are Tricia and Marcy; Schroeder is Beethoven; and the high school's sex-crazed jock is not only homophobic but extremely germophobic and gets enraged when anyone makes reference to his former filth-encrusted past (C.B.'s Sister taunts him with an allusion to the comic strip character's name: "Where swine live!)
In the various workshop, festival and off-Broadway productions, the actors were often fairly well-known young character actors from TV and film: both Patrick Fugit and Eddie Kaye Thomas played C.B., and other cast members included Anna Paquin, America Ferrera, Logan Marshall Green, and Eliza Dushku. We'd bet anything the MCC cast tonight was as good or better than most of them. The choices they made, their comic timing, the seamless and slippery interaction nearly always seemed to work. It may be in some sense C.B.'s story that begins with his existential quest to determine the ultimate fate of his dead dog, but like Peanuts itself, it's the ensemble that makes it work.
This blog post is in progress....
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder