Action Philosophers

Not having previously encountered Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey’s indie comic phenomenon Action Philosophers I come to the current stage adaptation in the Brick’s Comic Book Theatre Festival with, to use a concept borrowed from Locke, a tabula rasa. I am something geekier than a comics fan (although I was that too in my youth); I am a reader (or was) of the philosophers Van Lente writes about. I plowed through the Harvard Classics in my late teens and early twenties; later spent some time with Locke-Berkley-Hume (probably driven backwards there by Ayn Rand); explored Neitzche and the Existentialists; got interested in political economy and Adam Smith-John Stuart Mill-Herbert Spencer); and took cinema studies at NYU where it was impossible not to drown in Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard and company.

Now I am old and can scarcely do the crossword puzzle in the New York Post.

But I retain what might be called a cocktail party level of working knowledge of the great thinkers, which knowledge I think, while not a prerequisite, must enhance one’s enjoyment of the stage show, deftly penned by Van Lente’s wife, the much-lauded downtown playwright Crystal Skillman, and breezily staged by John Hurley. While Van Lente’s comic original necessarily provided a schematic thumbnail of the ideas of what he calls the “A-list philosophers” (I’ve since had an opportunity to read an issue), he doesn’t dumb it down AT All — no doubt this is one of the major reasons critics raved about it. That, and the fact that it is constantly and consistently hilarious, not just in the overall premise that the various philosophers are action heroes of a sort, but in the panel-by-panel gag play. I venture to say most playwrights would have been at a loss at to how to adapt this material: Skillman just leapt in and did it, selecting a half dozen philosophers to feature (out of the several dozen covered in the original comic book series), giving them seperate sections analagous to those in the comic books, and then smashing them together from time to time in the fashion of a WWE smackdown. Laudibly, she keeps Van Lente’s capsule explications of each philosopher’s main ideas. But unlike the comic book, where one can go back and re-read a sentence as one inevitably must, in Hurley’s appropriately fast-paced staging the concepts whiz by like Cottington Fairies. This is why a little prior Philosophy 101 won’t hurt; you won’t fret too much about missing anything, you can just sit back and enjoy the comedy.

And there is much of it to enjoy. This is an extremely able cast of comic actors (in both senses of the term), directed to play in very broad strokes, the sugar to make our medicine go down. There is already comedy on the page; Hurley finds ways to add another theatrical layer of specificity, always working from what’s already there. Thus, Plato, written as a masked Mexican wrestler, is knowingly played by C.L. Weatherstone in the style of the late Randy “Macho Man” Savage. Ryan Andes’ Descartes is a beret-wearing cartoon Frenchman. Kelly Rae O’Donnell’s Ayn Rand is a hot femme fatale. At one point, when the all-Caucasian cast were doing “Chinese” during the Bodhidharma section, I asked myself “is this okay?” I decided it was, given the broad impressions already delivered of Russians, Frenchmen and Germans, and the fact that those impressions, in the vaudeville tradition, were much more affectionate than malicious. (Also, I heard Ming and Toy’s granddaughter Jillian Tully chortling a couple of rows behind me, so it must have been okay). Kinetic slapstick abounds, philosophers flying through the air like so many juggled beanbags. When the smoke clears, you’ve been surreptiously — one might say insidiously — educated.

There are three performances left, starting tonight. Go here for more details.