Digital Analogue

Titanic

I just saw the strangest show.

This week's offering at the studio theatre is Titanic---no, not that one---directed by Jason Cascio. As is my wont, I entered the show knowing nothing about it; and in this case, I think that was an exceptionally good idea. If you're at Knox, go see it tomorrow, then come back and read the rest of this post. But get there early---I arrived ten minutes before the show started and the main seating area was already full. I'm not sure if they turned anyone away, but in the end they were seating people upstairs in the tech loft....

So anyway, the show started with several well-to-do folks eating a meal, dressed in turn-of-the-century costume, obviously on the real Titanic. So innocuous! Saras Gil's polished accent contributed to the atmosphere of elegance, and we settled in. But after a few moments, her character and her husband get into a spat, and she informs him that Teddy---who is there---is not his son. His response is that Annabella is not her daughter... wait, was this a comedy?

Rather. A lewd and extremely funny one. Aside from a few of the actors cracking smiles early on, there was little to mar the humour and bizarreness of the show. The floppy blue silicone dildo was a nice touch. I did see the gun in Brent's jacket, or at least, I saw something in there and intuited that it was a gun. But I certainly wasn't expecting it to actually fire!

I do hope whoever's playing the captain's wife takes every opportunity to cause mayhem. I mean, when the cast can see you and the audience can't, it's practically your duty to do something.

And Jamie Bellian's character-establishing monologue was masterful. I don't think she's a regular in the theatre crowd here---this is the first thing I've seen her in---but she must have had incredible fun with this part. How often do you really get a chance to reach under your skirt and feed a well-embedded seagull, after all?

And let me post an addendum to last week's notes about Noises Off. A thought that ran through my head then was, "huh, funny---this time Evan Sawdey is the only guy who we don't see running around in his underwear," a comment that may only make sense if you read my post about last winter's mainstage. I decided not to post it, because I'd look obsessed, or something, but I'm really starting to think it's not me that's obsessed with guys running around stage in their underwear. In this show, three of the four male characters spend a considerable amount of time wearing nothing but undershirt and boxers. That makes four shows and something like eight different characters in the last year, and that's just of the shows I've seen. This can't be a coincidence.

Not that I'm complaining. The underwear merely adds to the suave, elegant ambience established by the dildo and the hamsters. High literature it was not, but I found this show to be enormously fun.

"Another possible economic factor in explaining the roles of Utica and Rochester in the religious revival is that Finney arrived in both places at a time when the boom brought on by building a section of the canal had declined, and the townspeople had reverted to more thought upon their religious condition and to concern about "sin," a commodity that moved with considerable facility along the canal." --Hermann Muelder, Fighters for Freedom