✭✭✭✩✩

by Michael Kennard, directed by John Turner

Mump and Smoot & MK Productions, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto

June 13-28, 2008

Puzzle Me Red is the latest play by Michael Kennard, better known as Mump of the horror clown duo Mump and Smoot.  Though the satirical 75-minute play has clear message, it is performed in two incongruous styles that undermine rather than reinforce each other.

Kennard has created a brand new character for this show, Biv Rogy, who unlike any clown you’ve seen is not some sort of freak but is rather like your ordinary acquisitive neighbour down the street.  Yes, he has a white face, a red ball for a nose, odd eye makeup and three blue lesions instead of hair, but Kennard’s point is that what we accept as ordinary is actually disturbing if we examine it closely.  Biv breakfasts on Red Bull, pills and a power bar while reading the Star and skips troubling stories to look for sales.  He drives his Hummer to a yoga class before work and performs his pointless labour which eventually turns into a version of the famous chocolate factory episode of “I Love Lucy.”  While he thought he had avoided the day’s bad news, in fact it repeatedly haunts him in a series of beautifully staged tableaux that appear behind an upstage scrim.  Biv’s day progressively worsens until he is delivered the wrong package, one seeming containing his conscience.

All of this would work well as a critique of the ways North Americans use consumerism as means of avoiding the worlds’ unpleasant realities while simultaneously making those realities worse by doing nothing.  Yet, the funniest parts of the show have no connection to this.  Kennard is gifted at improv and uses it at every occasion with the audience, ushers and even his backstage assistants.  The most hilarious episode is when he stages a verbal fight with an audience member playing a driver who has violated his Hummer’s space and hands him a script of abuse to shout at him.  If the show had no serious intent none of these interruptions would matter, but it is disconcerting to have Kennard make uproarious off-the-cuff jokes while his character is supposedly in deepest despair.  The play is accompanied by James Fisher’s spacy, vaguely threatening music and Michael Charbonneau’s moody lighting.  The action is framed by Kennard as a spirit called the Caretaker (shades of “Star Trek: Voyager”!), clothed as a ghost from a Noh play, who singles out Earth for care at the beginning and tries to repair the harm mankind has wrought at the end.  Is the show a ritual or a comic parable with improv?  Unsuccessfully combining both leaves us puzzled. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-06-23.

Photo: Michael Kennard as Biv Rogy.