ABSURDIST BALLET - Fringe Snips
⊆ July 21st, 2006 by courtney | ˜Desire Caught by the Tail, by Pablo Picasso
Translated and Produced for the Capital Fringe Festival by banished? productions
Reviewed by Tim Treanor
In the end, the best way to watch this play is to sit back and enjoy it. Celebrate the fine young bodies in gorgeous movement. Don’t try to understand the talking toilets (John Lescalt, Nikki Strong, and Naomi Jacobson), with their gifts of shrimp and lottery tickets. Don’t struggle to parse out Tart’s (Tuyer Thi Pham) inexplicable, and highly flexible, passion for Big Foot (Frank Britton). Instead, sit back, enjoy the colorful set (three beautifully-decorated toilets in a cage of yellow pipes), listen to the dolorous bass (Allan von Schenkel), and marvel at the precision movement of this remarkable production.
Picasso’s Closet, the Ariel Dorfman play now showing at Theatre J, asks what Pablo Picasso was really doing while he lived in occupied France during the second war. Desire Caught by the Tail provides part of the answer: he was writing theater bathed in anti-Nazi sensuality for his friends (Sarte and de Beauvoir were in the original production, which was directed by Albert Camus). That the Nazis did not object is less a tribute to their tolerance than the likelihood that they did not understand it.
Director Carmen C. Wong wisely decides to emphasize the sensual elements of the play, hugely aided by the choreography of Meisha Bosma and Nicole Phillips, two astonishing young dancers who also appear as silent characters. Picasso wrote this hour-long play in six Acts and Wong stitches them together with poems of varying quality. One by Barbara Little seems closest to the spirit of the production.
Two performances merit special note: Clifton Alphonso Duncan manages to convey Picasso’s wink at his own production with great élan. And I mean no disrespect to John Lescalt, one of the areas busier, and better, actors when I say he is a most excellent toilet.
Desire Caught by the Tail plays July 21-23 at 7.30 p.m. at the Playbill Café, 1409 14th St. NW. Tickets are $17. For details, see www.banishedproductions.org
