Sand up your ass or a song in your heart?
Or, for the sake of comic clarity, let's break it down along these lines: Would you prefer a surfer chick with a split personality who bounces from giggly Gidget to glowering dominatrix bent on world conquest, or a creatively blocked Broadway composer bedeviled by women woes who talks to his bed, which talks back?
And the pick is ... Test Market's hilarious Psycho Beach Party over UNLV's tedious Bed in an upscale vs. Downtown face-off to bring on the funny. It's also a stare-down between logical absurdity and illogical absurdity—absurd as that seems.
Bed, Tom Swimm's tale of a man and a Posturepedic kvetch, is the winner of UNLV's annual Morton R. Sarett National Playwriting competition, though it's tough to imagine this noisy slapstick, if performed as written, was the cream of a nearly 500-script crop. Directed with one-note hysteria by Aaron Tuttle, the piece orbits the life of songwriter Carl (Joe Wheeler), who's nearing an artistic and emotional breakdown just as his wife, Vicki (Stella Baldauskas) leaves him, new girlfriend Marlene (Sara Bookout) complicates his life, and ferocious producer David Rosen (Malcolm Womack) threatens him with a deadline to churn out a love ballad for his new musical, The Girl from Yesterday.
Enter Carl's bed: a chatty female entity (Brook McGinnis), which begins peppering him with advice. A nag with box springs.
A guy conversing with his bed, the one item of household furniture that, were it capable of thought, would know you best, having hosted your most intimate moments? A bedroom farce at its most literal?
Sounds funny. Could've been. Isn't.
In the delicate construction of quasi-absurdist comedy Swimm seems to be building toward, Bed gets the balance fatally wrong, toppling over into a frantic, ham-handed mess. Though it's tent-poled by a clever fantasy conceit, Bed hangs its narrative on the very tangible hooks of marital discord and the intricacies of love, treating them with utter realism. Carl still moons over Vicki, whose heart isn't completely closed to him just yet, and managing his new relationship with Marlene while his old one remains unresolved—plus the pall it casts over his professional life—is a relatably real quandary.
Having set up this contrapuntal tone, we can accept the fantasy device as Carl's coping mechanism—he's one of those wacky creative types, after all—as long as all else around him remains grounded in logic. But it doesn't. Fantasy spills all over Bed, distorting the romantic themes it hopes to explore. Sexual romps are depicted not as lovemaking, but as raucous dancing on the bed to "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'," as if we've suddenly been yanked into American Bandstand. The boorish, bullying producer barrels onstage dressed as a pink bunny, spouting "f--k!" every third word, and later in drag, to berate Carl. His appearance is a fleetingly funny sight gag, but inexplicable. Are we in the real world here? Inside Carl's comedic dementia? If it's the latter, why the Peter !%$&! Cottontail getup? Even fantasy needs its own internal logic to succeed.
The cast carries on heroically, especially Wheeler as Carl, saddled as he is with lame Sealy mattress punch lines, and the saucy, comedically blessed McGinnis as the human manifestation of furniture—her laser timing could cut diamonds—but Bed sags, creaks and finally collapses.
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For an alternative that's deliciously, deliriously in love with its own deviance, try Test Market's Psycho Beach Party, Charles Busch's cracked homage to the Frankie and Annette oeuvre. Sado-masochism, gay love, child abuse, virginity, a fading movie sex queen, Yiddish, anal stimulation, a beating with a jockstrap and Jean-Paul Sartre all figure into the freaky fun. Oh, and surfing, too.
Directed with a joyous sense of all-American depravity by Damon Heath Sager, Psycho—staged at TM's tiny SEAT venue, the performing space dusted with sand just for the occasion and framed by facsimiles of ramshackle, bamboo beach huts—is Bed's opposite: a play that creates its own insane world and wholly adheres to its own loopy logic.
Which is why it's so easy to embrace this friggin' free-for-all.
The narrative threads are too numerous and ridiculous to enumerate—plot isn't the point as much as exuberant disrespect for societal convention—but the central story finds a heroine named Chicklet (Francine Gordon), an innocent surfer-chick wannabe, split into several personalities who spawn havoc and hilarity on the beach.
This is the type of runaway spoof in which outrageous dialogue is sprayed like verbal graffiti, defiling a clean-cut American archetype, delivered by a farce-happy cast that hyper-punctuates gag lines with puckish, mock-exaggerated posing. Imagine Frankie and Annette spouting lines such as: "Don't touch me, you blathering bull-dyke!" ... "I thought I was talking to the guy with the big cigar. What are you packing, a Tiparillo?" ... "This is the thing that holds their swollen genitalia!" (said while waving a jockstrap) ... "I still haven't finished with the IIiad / Oh, you got man problems, honey?" ... "She's incognito / No, she's German-Irish!" ... "Give in to the feeling, Daddy-O" (cooed by an ass-wiggling Chicklet while on all fours).
There isn't one performer not up to the requisite comic gusto, led by Gordon in all her full-throated, motormouth glee (especially in mistress mode, delivering spankings). Other standouts include: Timothy J. Caldwell, sporting a permanent Elvis lip curl as the Big Kanaka; T.J. Larsen, Walt Turner and Barrett Alexander Shaw as doofus beach bums, straight and not-so-straight; Jackie Oxley as an over-the-hill, Z-movie sex kitten; Keriann Parks as a Nietzsche-spouting geeky girl; and the transvestite delights of director Sager, doubling as a hefty sex bomb; and especially Enoch Augustus Scott, approaching Harvey Fierstein heights straight out of Hairspray as Chicklet's mamma from hell.
Hit the beach, kids! Do the Frug and the Boogaloo and the Monkey!
Hell, spank the Monkey!
Psycho Beach Party is balls-out bonkers.