The Lesser Magoo

[September 12th, 2007] [BIZARRO] It’s finished! After four seasons, defunkt theatre has finally made it to the last installment of the Crowtet—Mac Wellman’s loosely connected quartet chronicling the bizarre adventures of Susanna Curran—a feat only one other company in the country has ever pulled off. The plays, which the author says make up “an unofficial gloss on the apocrypha of low-rent America,” are unabashedly weird—full of inscrutable jargon and paranormal events.

This time we see Curran (fresh from a journey to bury the moon with the prophetical Mr. William Hard in last year’s Second-Hand Smoke) conducting a brutal job interview in a mysterious office. She also attends a dinner party—which becomes exponentially stranger as it devolves into magical shenanigans in the woods—during which she meets a handicapped mathematician, a drunken writer and a burned-out senator.

Sound normal enough? Not really. While this installment of the Crowtet is more coherent than its predecessors—as coherent, anyway, as a show punctuated with song-and-dance numbers with lyrics like “order is my washing machine, oh, wango” can be—it’s still a Wellman play, packed with obscure, pseudoscientific linguistic horseplay and suffused with oblique, unsettling occultism.

What makes Wellman’s work isn’t plot, for which he has little regard, but the intricate mythology and culture of the bizarro America his characters call home. It’s a world where a politician can rant about Bush and Perot while worrying about the knife of the Lesser Magoo, buried in the woods near Moon Hat, and housewives offer prayers to the devilish Great Toothy. Wellman takes the greed and dehumanization he sees eating away at our society and gleefully throws it through the looking glass. It’s scary.

As usual, defunkt has furnished this difficult beast of a play with excellent set, sound and costume design, continuing to play with the ribbon theme established in Second-Hand Smoke . James Moore, Frances Binder, Danika Stochosky and company handle the absurd language gamely, and belt out the musical interludes with abandon. It takes an almost lunatic courage to pull off a project as obscure and financially untenable as the Crowtet, but there are few companies more courageous than defunkt. Bless ’em, by Great Toothy.