Nude Rabbis, voodoo transvestites and satanic worshippers aren't garden-variety elements of Vegas community theater.
To our detriment. For all of our Strip salaciousness, once you swing off the main drag and into one of our cozy playhouses, we're largely a Fiddler on the Roof town. Certainly, we rarely see original plays subtitled Schtup a Nafka in Tuchas, Alevai. We'll translate: F--k a Whore in the Ass, It Should Only Happen.
Properly Yiddishized, we move onto The Shande of Rabbi Schlemazel (shande means "shame," rhymes with "Honda"), the latest act of gleeful pseudo-sacrilege from Test Market, one of Vegas' theatrical subversives, alongside the merry bent Cockroach troupe.
Not-so-coincidentally staging Schlemazel during Passover, the Testies demonstrate anew their fondness for poking a sharp, satirical stick into society's hornets' nests.
Not dagger-sharp satire. More fondue-fork satire. Talmudic scholars might pass, but the rest of us in the tribe will emerge unscathed, and rather entertained.
Trying to concoct "the most shameful play ever produced, a Jewish Rocky Horror Picture Show," Gary Janis and Ernest Hemmings' original comedy-drama is so self-consciously blasphemous, so eager, even insistent to shock, that it succeeds more as an enjoyable tantrum than authentic artistic sabotage of religious hegemony; unless you scrape the mold off the old religion-is-just-a-cult-with-a-better-haircut motif and assign it some inexplicable new potency.
I don't, which eliminates any substantive narrative point, leaving the entertainment value to pure narrative chutzpah. But the chutzpah pays off. Though a crime twist falls flat and the dialogue is only genuinely funny on occasion, the play's outrageous conceit—topped by stereotypes too broad to truly offend but buffoonish enough to amuse, committed performances, and inventive staging—carries it along.
At the Arts Factory's 24-seat Social Experimentation and Absurd Theater (SEAT) venue, Schlemazel tells of Rabbi Lenny Schlemazel (Joel Wayman), entranced by a transvestite named LaShonde, played by the transvestilicious Rudalenska in blond-slut wig, black cocktail dress and heels. She/he practices "sex magic." Aided by mixed-media touches, the rabbi recounts bringing mega-Jewish guilt upon his tortured soul and disgrace to his devout family while unloading to a therapist (Hemmings).
Wayman is hyperactive and henpecked, answering every question with a question and consumed by his operatic self-pity. Wayman sells it with nebbishy relish, freed from the constraints of subtlety or shading by Hemmings-as-director.
The sparse resources force focus on the characters and prevent bloating. Compact staging creates a quickened pace and staccato rhythm that gooses our attention.
In the designated scene of sacrilege, the rabbi's wife (an energetically yenta-like Francine Gordon) lights Sabbath candles in the background with their children, while LaShonde, in a bloodletting ritual aided by hooded satanists, forces a gratuitously nude Schlemazel to submit in the foreground.
If these heathens expect righteous smiting for their heretical ways, they'll be disappointed. But the subtitle might make God's thought-for-the-day desk calendar.