Quasimondo Physical Theatre
Quasimondo Physical Theatre opens its third season in a new venue, Studio G, tucked into the space of its collaborator, Milwaukee Public Theatre. The Nov. 28 preview performance of Buboes was a spectacle of gallows humor and pedigreed clowning.
An ensemble piece created by Quasimondo during a six-week process of improvisation and discussion, Buboes: A Bouffon Medicine Show satirizes the Bubonic Plague and interrogates humanity’s responses to calamity. Jacques Lecoq’s modern French school, as well as Italian Renaissance Commedia dell’arte, inspire the production’s “bouffon” clowning style.
Commedia archetypes abound, including gullible merchant Pantalone (Kirk Thomsen), witty maid Colombina (Emily Craig) and swaggering swordsman Capitano (Jenni Reinke). Per Lecoq’s pedagogy, however, the actors also imbued their characters with personalized mannerisms and psychology.
Costumes played a large role in this process. The performers wear heavy makeup and full-body leotards, elaborated to match their characters. Many also have stuffing under their suits creating fascinating physical distortions that shape their movement. Jessi Miller bears the most extreme iteration, carrying a small mattress on her back for the entire show and allowing it to guide her hunchbacked characterization.
Brilliant physicality continues as actors dance in stiff, corpselike manner; ooze out of a crawlspace; and manipulate large puppets. They simultaneously weave soundscapes from moans, laughter, gibberish and humming, eschewing any actual words. In this surreal environment, well-chosen French classical and jazz music augments the alternately comic and horrifying tone of the piece.
The storytelling hinges on vignettes since the change we observe is of a broader scope than any one character’s journey. The society is stratified, but as the plague spreads, the formerly powerful find themselves equally susceptible. Only the Buboes (grotesque clowns inspired by Commedia’s lowliest servant characters) seem immune to infection, and their depravity grows as the body count rises.
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Grim in subject matter, but clever and scholarly in form, Buboes is a show for viewers interested in the history of clowning and/or the nature of humanity’s dark side revealed through disaster.
The show runs through Dec. 14 at Studio G in the Shops of Grand Avenue, 161 W. Wisconsin Ave. For tickets, visit thequasimondo.com.
Warning: mature, graphic content.
