Legs and All

This Critic, untrained in “clown”, has always been a staunch defender of what might be termed the Merely Ludicrous Image. It’s always seemed to me that many in the red nose crowd, taught (appropriately) that good comedy comes from situation and character, sometimes work so hard to avoid the unmotivated seltzer bottle that they neglect the meat and potatoes, which is Make the Funny. So the creators of Legs and All, still playing in Horse Trade Theatre Group’s Frigid Festival, won me over in the opening seconds of their hour long piece. A woman in a box. She looks this way. Black out. She looks that way. Black out. She makes her hands relate like a couple of puppets. Black out. No way in hell this registers as funny by reading this, and that’s my point. It looks funny, and funny’s the bottom line.

The woman in the box, Summer Shapiro (whose name, come to think of it, is a kind of Chinese ideogram for “Catskills”) is a riveting marvel. With the perfect placidity that marks all great clowns, she negotiates her way through a toy universe like a Beckett character without the intercession of a wordsmith. Some of it is painfully acquired skill, let there be no doubt. She and her partner Peter Musante prove themselves contortionists many times over. At one point they turn a dinner table on its side and sit at it, giving the audience a perspective from the ceiling, something I’ve enjoyed more than once in the cinema, but never in the theatre. This alone would justify the use of the oft-abused term “magic” in the publicity materials. That’s cool, but it’s physical. You can train anyone with a healthy body to do it, once having thought of it. But you can’t teach how to think of it. That’s the difference here. The fire in the belly, the instinct and will to behave (and misbehave) in front of an audience. The ideas are inspired; so is the performance.

There’s a gossamer cobweb of a plot, but almost as a sop to convention. The two nameless characters spot each other, and like a couple of cellmates in a juvenile insane asylum, begin to petulantly interact. Inevitably they overcome their petty competition and come together, after a fashion. That’s the story arc. But the stronger muscle by far is the pair’s visual ingenuity. The piece is really a bricolage of surreal moments worthy of Tati or Ernie Kovacs. They are like strange little snapshots, very cinematic, helped a long by very funny music and sound cues (theramin music, a silly French narrator, etc)

Some of this leads to other, more populist, places. One character wipes the other’s face with a napkin that magically puts chocolate frosting ON the face, rather than taking it off. When Shapiro inevitably gets the frosting on her own face, we are just as inevitably reminded of Lucy. I love little resonances like this. Comedy is a ritual. A ritual is a thing you go back to, time after time. So I’d gladly check in on this team again to see what inspired silliness they come up with. For info on tickets to the few remaining appearances, go here.

To learn about the roots of variety entertainment, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.