Theatre Gigante: Over 1,000 Words On A Program With Little Dialogue

This weekend, Theatre Gigante presents a program of two theatrical pieces heavily grounded in solid physical comedy. UWM's Kenilworth Studio 508 is a really nice venue for that sort of thing. The audience is an East Side crowd that mixes some very experienced theatergoers with shiny, young university students who are seeing the show as an assignment for class. It's a really interesting mix of an audience. 

(What follows is many, many words on a program which uses very few of its own. There's a good chance that there are more words in the above paragraph than are spoken in the course of this program.)

The first piece on the program is Malcolm Tulip's The Scottish . . . Play. The show's printed program states that the action of the piece takes place backstage between matinee and evening performances of Macbeth.

With little to no dialogue, the physical comedy of the piece plays through in a pleasantly surreal fugue. Tulip's inventive imagination has elements of Shakespeare's tragedy mutated into physical gags. John Kishline is a Macbeth who suffers greatly in a variety of different ways over the course of the narrative. Kishline looks comically haggard in the role as he and the two others onstage prepare for another great tragedy. Isabelle Kralj is fun as a bit of a diva here in the role of Lady Macbeth. Her personal co-star here is a plush toy dog that adds a bit of clever semi-puppetry into a few key moments of the story. Her interaction with Kishline's Macbeth is a delicious sort of animosity. Mark Anderson rounds out the cast in the role of "Banqo (ghost.)" Anderson is comically outside the animosity between Macbeth and Lady Macbeh playing kind of a childish figure who also seems to paradoxically be the biggest conscience in the course of events that take place. There's a really brilliant bit of comedy involving Anderson with a couple of baby dolls that serves as one of the more lasting images in the entire short. 

After the stage is cleaned-up from the pleasant frenzy of Tulip's piece, David Gaines enters the stage to deliver his dialogue-free features piece A Little Business at the Big Top. Gaines had made a memorable impression with Gigante not too long ago performing his one-man Seven Samurai piece 7 (x1) Samurai. That piece had Gaines alone performing without dialogue as every role in Akira Kurosawa's most famous work. Here Gaines is a one-man circus comedy. Though it is anything but silent, (he utters plenty of sound effects) Gaines' narrative plays very much like a Charlie Chaplin-era silent film. Though the plot is completely different from Chaplin's The Circus (and just about anything else Chaplin did) the plot structure and pacing of the story of A Little Business at the Big Top feels very much like a classic silent movie. The central hero of the story could almost be an analog for Chaplin's Tramp in style and personality. 

The fact that this feels like a feature-length silent comedy is pretty impressive considering it's just one guy. True, there are no caption cards to set-up certain scenes and it can be a little disorienting making transitions from one moment to the next, but Gaines is telling a very vivid story here entirely without dialogue. It's easy enough to point out that Gaines is doing a variety of different roles in pretty sophisticated characterization, but what's easy to overlook here is how effectively Gaines renders every element of the story including scenery, location and a variety of different circus animals. 

As shaky as some of the transitions between scenes sometimes feel in A Little Business at the Big Top, David Gaines is really a master of the one-man jump cut. A moment is established. A gag is delivered that perhaps increases tension in the central conflict involving a mutual attraction between a guy working concessions and a woman who works the high wire . . . and then we're off to some other place in the circus with minimal set-up. And there's just enough time to establish what's going on before the next part of the narrative plays out onstage. When looked at in terms of the physical narrative composition of the piece, it's pretty staggeringly well-thought-out. Were it not, it would look like an indecipherable hot mess of action onstage. That this is recognizable as a narrative at all is really, really impressive.

It's also pretty easy to overlook just how much work Gaines gives the audience to do. Perhaps the most popular end of modern narrative storytelling is the big-budget multiplex movie. Hollywood producers are paid good money to try to deliver stories that will appeal to as many people as possible. Usually this involves telling stories with absolutely no subtlety that deliver everything to the viewer without them having to think about it at all. Don't think: sit back and watch. This is precisely the opposite of what Gaines is doing here. 

What's cool about Gaines' work is that, as an audience, we are doing tremendous amount of work simply imagining the world of A Little Business at the Big Top. With simple, well-executed gestures and subtle movements, Gaines delivers minimalist bits of storytelling that are cleverly suggestive enough to let the audience do the rest of the work without it feeling like work. It's a game that we're playing with Gaines--passively interactive in an enjoyable way. In an era of heavily packaged, mass-marketed glossy test-marketed narratives, that's tremendously novel. Gaines' performance style is a dying art. It's nice to see it done this well in an intimate venue. 

Gaines' story feels only a little long and slow in certain places at certain times. Some of the gags feel a little too drawn-out at times. This has a lot to do with the fact that there are so many variables in a performance like this that  rely so heavily on subtle movements and characterizations from just one guy. It's delicate stuff--what might seem a little long on opening night could seem perfectly paced on the following evening. As I say, it's really remarkable that Gaines is able to construct a story with so much going on in it and so many jump cuts without having the narrative feel hopelessly scattered. It's really a remarkable accomplishment. 

Theatre Gigante's The Scottish . . . Play and A Little Business at the Big Top runs through November 16th at Kenilworth Studio 508 at 1905 East Kenilworth Place. For ticket reservations, call 800-838-3006 or visit Brown Paper Tickets.