There are a lot of reasons why puberty would seem like a great setup for a clown show. Puberty is that horrible time of passage from child to adult, from pleasure to reality (in a Freudian sense), a time of incredible vulnerability and discovery, where the world becomes bigger, less friendly, where even your own body becomes an unpredictable enemy.
Jasp and Morro, a captivating clown duo from Canada, take on the task. Menstruation, attractiveness, rebellion, sexuality, all get get treated by these two, with great comic effect. There are some wonderful moments of vulnerability. Jasp especially has an easy way of inviting the audience into flights of fancy. And there are a couple of great moments where she gets carried away and her soft, demure side yields to a more dangerous, obsessed person.
Those obsessed moments were the ones I relished most. I wanted there to be more. The show is well-structured. Cleverly structured. There are great surprises and nicely handled moments of audience participation.
However, at some point I felt like I was not watching a clown duo play a show about puberty and two pubescent girls, but, rather, two clowns who WERE pubescent girls. The difference may seem semantic, but to me it is crucial. Clowns are not the given circumstances they play; they are beyond that. (For an example of Pochinko-influenced clowns successfully navigating this territory, check out any video you can find of Asylum-137's “Clowns in the Vagina”.)
Puberty is, arguably, a time when we are all clowns. In clowning this situation, then, we must be careful not to let the given circumstances capture the clown. This is how I felt with Jasp and Morro: while punctuated with good moments, I was not sure if these two clowns knew that this was a clown show. I saw puberty do Jasp and Morro, not the other way around.
The show is brilliantly structured. Great setups. Great audience participation. Great character arcs. But it needs the clowns to go further. More competition. More embarrassment. More surety in mission. More panic and betrayal. More bloody tampons and maxi pads and makeup and TeenPeople Magazines erupting into the space. I don't just want the absurdity of puberty, I want the absurdity of clowns doing puberty!
One nice moment that captures it right is Jasp's dance with her stuffed animal. I won't spoil the outcome, but this is one place where the absurd world of pubescent crossed over into the world of the clown. I want more of that.
This is a good show. It's more than worth seeing. They've got lots of things going for them and have done a lot of things right. It's not yet a great show. To make it so, these excellent performers and their director should take this set of ridiculous situations, transfer them into a ridiculous world, and see what happens.
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