Theater Review - Surreal suburbia
At Home With the Nixons offers a surreal take on a Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
Brazen Act’s production of At Home With the Nixons suggests a sweat lodge experience, the kind of ritual where you endure sweltering temperatures until you begin seeing hallucinations. Uncomfortably warm on opening night, the Top Shelf space of Dad’s Garage Theatre may be better air-conditioned for subsequent performances, but the visions provided by playwright Ian Fuller will always be bizarre and dream-like.
Nixons offers a surreal take on a Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? premise, as a clean-cut suburban family entertains Antoinin Artaud (Marc Cram), the drug-addicted French poet and playwright. While Dad (Tim Cordier) and Mom (Melissa Mason) smile over the dinner ham, the demented-looking Artaud intones his theories about the Theater of Cruelty. Artaud proves the worst babysitter imaginable for the son (Eamon Glennon), telling “The Town That Had Rabies” as a bedtime story.
Crazed behavior and absurd images make up the play, as when the actors move in slow-motion or Dad uses paper cutouts to recap Artaud’s life. Characters find themselves unable to make the transition into subsequent scenes, until someone simply screams, “Later that evening!” The amusingly shell-shocked Cram uses wicked knives and hypodermic needles with equal gusto, and at one point, his hand dripping with stage blood, he enters the audience and sits uncomfortably close to a guy in a white shirt.
At Home with the Nixons takes place over a brisk half-hour, short enough to ensure that the play doesn’t overstay its welcome (although $10 for tickets may be more than some people will want to spend). Directed by Fuller, the show’s performances and events are playful enough that you don’t have to treat it seriously. You can take it at face value and try to decode its weird symbolism, or approach it as a goof on avant-garde theater, good for a few giggles.
At Home With the Nixons plays through Aug. 12 at the Top Shelf space of Dad’s Garage Theatre Company, 280 Elizabeth St., with performances at midnight Fri. and Sat. $10. 678-380-1484.??