Combat Theatre Round One

The first evening of this summer’s Bunny Gumbo Combat Theatre generally felt a bit more reserved than it did last year. Combat theatre goes something like this: playwrights draw subjects and locations out of a hat. 24 hours later, there’s a full script. Bunny Gumbo does this for two consecutive days, churning out over a dozen shorts in less than 48 hours.

Day One this year, which wrapped-up last night, was extravagantly light comedy. Some notable skits included:

Fleet Street Flat Tops: Steve Midthun’s comic marriage of Sweeney Todd and the Barber of Seville. A clever concept drawn from the hats as Conspiracy Theory at a Barber Shop

Sweatin’ to the Oldies: Patrick Holland’s Dream Ballet at a Sweat Shop complete with ballet interpretation of two Mexican immigrants crossing the border to America.

The single best moment, however, had to be Amy Geyser’s inadvertently long and surprisingly comic death scene as a pirate at the end of Jim Thibodeau’s The Mutineer (I believe it was drawn out of the hat as Mutiny on the Loch Ness or some such . . .)

The scripts will have already been written for tonight’s show by the time this gets posted. The subject/setting combos drawn from the hat at the end of the show sound promising:

Tony Wood was reluctant to accept Napoleon in a Men’s Room until audience reaction persuaded him to go with it.

Doug Jarecki seemed particularly happy with his luck in getting Method Acting at a Gun Fight.

Bunny Gumbo co-founder James Fletcher drew Bouncers in a Janitor’s Closet.

All of these and more (including what I'm pretty sure ended up being Zombies in Detention) will be staged at 8pm tonight in Bunny Gumbo’s second evening of combat theatre at the Mlwaukee Youth Arts Center.

A full review of all the skits in detail will appear here Wednesday with a full review in next week’s Shepherd-Express.