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Theatre in Review: Bears in Space (Collapsing Horse/59E59)

Aaron Heffernan, Jack Gleeson. Photo Idil Sukan

Bears in Space starts out with a solid laugh as the show's narrator, known as the Story Keeper -- and a bit of a Jane Austen freak -- introduces his three sons, Bertram, Darcy, and Lady Susan Vernon. For a brief, flickering second, I felt a faint echo of Monty Python's Flying Circus and I thought that we might be in for 75 minutes of solid absurdist fun.

Well, I always was a cockeyed optimist. Bears in Space quickly reveals itself to be a nonstop parade of strenuously unfunny non sequitur gags about -- well, about bears in space. They include Officers Bhourgash and Volyova and Captain Lazara, in the year 300,000, boldly going where no bear has gone before, via their spacecraft, the SS Quickfast. Emerging from cryogenic sleep chambers, Bhourgash and Volyova end up tangling with Premier Niko, of Metrotopia, an "industrious city" far out in the universe, and Niko's weird sidekick, named Gorax, who plot to loot the Quickfast. There's also a bizarre character named Skin, described as "kind of a goblin thing," whose best friend, Clement, is represented by a spool tape recorder. "We dated for a while," says Skin about Clement. "It's not awkward or anything. I just wasn't emotionally available for him."

The above should give you a sense of the show's approach, which might best be described as anti-comedy, a method that relies on extreme juxtapositions in search of laughs. There's a HAL-style computer that tells bad knock-knock jokes. Niko comments to Gorax, "We've paid off every real enemy a thousand times over. Sector Six is the safest sector in the Seven Sect-ors! Except for Sector Seven, of course, but who wants to live there." Then the two them riff extensively, sharing Sector Seven impressions, amusing themselves by making comments like "Oh, hello, I'm from Sector Seven," in dorky voices. Niko, invading the Quickfast and finding the commander still in her cryogenic state, cracks, "This must be the poor little Captain I've heard talk of? Talk about frozen assets!"

And so it goes. The four young members of the troupe Collapsing Horse (including Jack Gleeson, an alumnus of Game of Thrones) are seemingly trying to find a place for themselves in the oddball tradition of Monty Python and The Goon Show in the UK, or, perhaps, of Ernie Kovacs in the US, all of whom specialized in comedy where the laughs came from bizarre setups with out-of-left-field gags. What's lacking here is the rigorous discipline and strong point of view that distinguished those now-gone greats. Everything about Bears in Space is slapdash, from the troupe's timing to the ratty bear puppets that look as if they have been through the rinse cycle one too many times, to the frankly bad lighting.

Even more troubling, the humor in Bears in Space has no real-world referents. The Collapsing Horse troupe isn't practicing satire; its members are merely making funny faces and assuming eccentric voices, as if these alone would guarantee hilarity. It's rather like watching a quartet of collegians sitting in a dorm room, inventing comic bits to crack each other up; because they know each other so well, they find practically everything they do amusing. Anyone not on their extremely distant wavelength is unlikely to get the joke.

Clearly, there is an audience for this sort of thing, although how large it is remains an open question. At the performance I attended, roughly half of the audience chuckled steadily through the performance while the rest sat stone-faced. Even then, the response was distinctly hit-or-miss, with many gags falling far short of a boffo response.

Bears in Space ends more or less happily, with Premier Niko, "sucked out into space and abandoned on Jungolia," being "soon forgotten when the people of Metrotopia abandoned tyranny in favor of the much more flavorsome rule from below." The Story Keeper adds, "As you go forth into your world -- eating your pies and fostering ethics in your progeny -- I hope you will tell this tale in your own way, over a round of mineral drinks with friends, or to yourself alone in the dark every night." If such details as "flavorsome rule" or "a round of mineral drinks" strike you as an expression of a delightfully daffy sensibility, you may find a great deal to laugh at in Bears in Space. If you find this sort of thing labored and twee in the extreme, you'd best give this attraction a very wide berth. All I know is that when the Story Keeper closed out the evening by announcing "I'm very tired," I knew just how he felt. -- David Barbour


(13 September 2016)

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