The premise is great! A goofball circus from parts-unknown blows into town for their US debut, and proceeds to fail miserably in every conceivable way. I have done two shows using this premise. The first one, The Extreme Monster Mask Rally, a goofball circus where all the acts were creatures wearing Basel carnival masks who also somehow played live music, was quite possibly the worst show I have ever been (partly) responsible for. The best thing that came out of that show was the fact that a reviewer from Paper Magazine came one night, but because he was the only one who showed up, we sent him away. This saves me from having this miserable failure of a show documented in any sort of publication, but trust me, it was bad. You can ask Audrey Crabtree. She tekked the show. Or ask Eric Davis or Nick Trotter. They were in it.
Cirkus Luna was not as bad as that show. In it, a band of ridiculously clad buck-toothed (all wearing identical Bubba Teeth prostheses—the same ones they wear for their signature Fools Mass), speaking in some unidentifiable Slavic pidgin English perform a series of stupid tricks stupidly. From the description thus far, if you know me, you might think this is right up my alley. And I wanted to like it. I desperately did. And I did laugh at a few things. But I was also offended, mostly aesthetically. I am not sure if this was supposed to be a bouffon show or a clown show. It was neither, although it contained semiotic signs of both.
First, just one little pet peeve. A central premise of the show is that these people are from elsewhere. They are “other”. In this case, they seem to be from some Slavic country that is backward, unhip, naïve, stupid, cretinous, full of stage fright, clumsy, and apparently bereft of orthodontists or toothbrushes. This is an old trope. We used to see it in the Wendy's commercials in the 80's, which were funny. We saw it with Robert Smigel's bad imitations of Boris Yeltsin on Conan in the 90's. (Also funny.) But those two cases work for different reasons. The Wendy's spots worked because they were one-offs: 30-second jokes used to sell hamburgers. Smigel's short sketches worked because behind the seeming incompetence and alcoholism of the Yelstin he played was a virtuouso comedian that boiled over into the scene. More recently Sacha Baron Cohen treaded into these chauvniistic waters with Borat, a sort of backward buffoon from Kazakhstan (not a Slav, but from a former Soviet country.) And while Borat makes me bristle a bit when he is in Kazakhstan, his act makes complete sense in America, as if he is saying, “you think Borat is an asshole? Look at all these 'normal' people around him who are even bigger assholes?” Wendy's succeeds because it is short. Smigel succeeds because he makes Yeltsin merely a current events premise for great play. Baron Cohen succeeds because, as a sort of filmic buffoon, he shows us that WE are the real clowns.
Cirkus Luna succeeds in none of those ways. It seems to use Slavs as some sort of fall guy, as a reason to act stupidly and without redemption. It's like a bad black-faced minstrel show, where ineptitude is framed as funny simply because it's done by people playing negroes. (I have a suspicion that successful minstrel shows were better than this, hence their popularity, but never having seen one, I can only speculate.) I am a Slav – part Polish, part Ukrainian, part Russified Lithuanian, part Russified Jew – and I speak my mother's maiden tongue, Russian. And I fully admit that there are many funny things about our culture, in terms of the way it manifests its own brand of global “hip” culture. (Just watch some Russian music videos sometime.) But I'm a little offended at the taking hostage of my people so you can play morons. This show is like one long pollack joke, but it is worse, because at least in the telling of the pollack joke, it is mediated through a joke teller, who may be able to guide you to the core funny of the misunderstanding that really has nothing to do with being Polish. Not that I am a big fan of pollack jokes or elephant (i.e. African American) jokes, or jokes on any ethnicity, but in the best case scenario the use of the word pollack is merely an introduction, a conditioning element that readies us to hear about a funny situation that would be funny if it happened to anyone. This show was more like the pollack joke told in Raising Arizona, (I'm paraphrasing), “how come it takes 5 Polish people to screw in a light bulb? Cuz they're so stupid!”
You wanna make fun of Slavs? Go for it! But why don't you start by doing some research at Tatiana in Brighton Beach, or at a casino in Moscow, or a nightclub in Vilnius. And once you've gotten those types down, how are you going to show us that THEY are US?
But enough about being personally offended. Let's get to the aesthetics. A great attempt has been made in this show to structure episodes of failure. It succeeds. The tricks are stupid and banal. A great attempt has also been made create a company of idiots who will continue no matter what. It succeeds. But here is the problem: why do they continue? We have a troupe of incredibly fearful proto-clowns, with almost no personality of their own, try and flail, and fail, at all times prodded by a smiling, bucked-toothed ringmaster. They have no joy, only fear and suffering. I began to wonder, was this on purpose? Am I supposed to think that there is a firing squad of FSB, or Lukashenko-sponsored agents standing behind the curtains, waiting to shoot them if the audience does not clap loudly enough? If this was the premise (and an interesting premise it would be), it should have been driven much further.
There are even structured flops, but they yield nothing. In short, these clowns have no personality. They follow orders, but they do not express desires or wants, only abject shame. In this steel trap of a structure, no one is allowed to breathe, to express themselves, to have a victory. They try very little and fail a lot, but never develop relationships with each other. There is no change, or even challenge, to hierarchy. It is as if this show has set out to impersonate Stalinism itself, an arguably humorless project. It is odd to see this from a self-professed adherent to Jerzy Grotowski, as director/Ringmaster Matt Mittler describes himself (after all, the history of art in the Soviet Union, is, in part, a history of subversion, of subtly, sometimes humorously, raging against the machine.) But maybe there's the rub. I saw Grotowski speak in Paris in 1997, and one thing he was short on was humor. And these pitiful beings of The Realm of Suffering did make me think of descriptions of Grotowski's characters from The Constant Prince, but not in a good way.
From a technical standpoint, there are plenty of shout-outs to clown structures: lining up, group activities, repeated patterns, but there are no clowns to fill them. There is no joy, no hope, too much flailing, not enough precision, and not enough eyes. It is as if the acts and the failures are “signed” but they are not shared. This is true of most of the pieces, such as the water ballet, the human cannonball, and the I-don't-know-how-many-times-but-it-was-too-many circular march-while-singing-an-unidentifiable-anthem.
One bright spot was the moment when the clown big clown, Boron, attempted to walk the “tight rope” (really just a piece of cloth on the floor.) He succeeds in walking it where others have failed, but every step brings more terror, until he is left a crumbled mess, blubbering into the ringmaster's arms. This was well played. It also opened up a question about the relationship of the clowns to the ringmaster: is there some sort of EST, or guru groupthink going on? That could have worked as a premise to help define these characters, but this was the only moment.
Also, the group belly-flopping at the end of the water ballet made for a nice moment. For one of the few times in the show, we saw the clowns succeed in making a beautiful, ridiculous image.
The encore – Riverdance
Get rid of the intro. Whatever you have done to this poor woman who introduces this act and some others, stop it. It's like watching a person who hasn't eaten in ten years try to recite a Robert Frost poem while passing a violin she ate yesterday. Have her do something else. She's obviously a good performer. Give her character something that gives her joy, despite her ridiculousness.
A great moment was missed in the Riverdance numero. For the first time, the four clowns arrived and seemed to express some ridiculous hope and individuality. And they were charming in their dances. This was all eclipsed by Mr. Mittler's entrance, which drove things (yet again) over the top and into poorly executed camp.
As I quoted my teacher, Bob, in my last post, “start simply.” Sans teeth. Sans accents. Sans Cirkus. It's enough of a brilliant feat to have a company of six clowns just line-up in the right place. That can be a 10-minute piece! So much about character and relationship can be revealed. This is what I like so much about rehearsing in looped routines. Simple structures may not be smart, but they can allow one to go deeper. And after the depths have been plumbed, you can cleverly put them into situations.
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