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Theatre in Review: P.S. Jones and the Frozen City (TerraNOVA Collective)

This may be a case of splitting hairs, but: P.S. Jones and the Frozen City is described in its publicity materials as a comic-book superhero adventure story -- and it is true that the title character cherishes comic books, which, as it happens, are hard to come by in the post-apocalyptic environment he inhabits. But, to my eyes, the entire enterprise appears to be a spoof of the kind of teen fantasy fiction represented by Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. This had to happen sometime, and the book -- if the movie is any guide -- is certainly ripe for lampooning. In any case, whatever the source of his inspiration, the playwright, Robert Askins, is primarily interested in pig shit.

The action takes place in some unspecified future after some unspecified environmental disaster. P.S. (as in Pig Shit) Jones is one of a group of outliers, caricatures of John Steinbeck's Joads, who live in poverty in a wasteland; "the hog farm is one of the five united outliers protected by [a] glass spider in the frozen city in exchange for meat and tribute," the script notes, by way of handing out exposition. P.S. has a pretty-boy brother, Benjamin, who is selected for a career in the Frozen City, a forbidden destination with an Oz-like allure for the outliers. "What's the job?" P.S. asks Benjamin. "I get looked at," he replies, adding that he was chosen for the quality of his abs -- which for the purposes of this production, are painted on his stomach. "I view you with a mixture of worship, envy, and hate so strong you could call it love," P.S. adds in the play's one truly amusing exchange. Both Joe Paulik, as P.S., and Preston Martin, as Benjamin, impress as technically skilled young actors with real stage presence, something both of them will need as they become further entangled in the play's wandering, often vague narrative.

After Benjamin departs for what is presumed to be a life of glamour in the city, P.S. finds, hidden inside a pile of porcine ordure, a large green hand, which gives him super powers; this development is accompanied by the appearance of a gunslinger's ghost. After a couple of minutes of dialogue along the lines of "Well, thanks for the wake up, Cat Crap," the two of them head off for the Frozen City and a fateful confrontation with the Glass Spider, who rules there; they will also meet up with Benjamin, who has been installed as a kind of official spokesman for the Glass Spider's regime. Along the way, there are encounters with a pair of moronic brothers and their girlfriend, who fight over possession of a turnip; a notably un-jolly green giant named Lothar; and a tribe of cannibals, or, as P.S. puts it, "Y'all 'er cannonballs."

On a technical/design level, P.S. Jones and the Frozen City is quite the achievement. There is some fairly sensational puppet work -- both the Great Glass Spider and Lothar require the services of three performers inside a single costume; the Spider is at least as impressive, in its way, as Arachne in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. (These were designed by Eric Wright and The Puppet Kitchen.) The projections, by Alex Koch and David Tennant, using illustrations by Kate Freer, create a series of constantly changing backgrounds -- a map of P.S.' travels, a burning desert, the interior of the Frozen City -- which go a long way toward creating the play's alternate universe; one occasionally has the sensation of being placed inside the frame of a comic book. Jason Simms' scenery, Carla Bellisio's costumes, and Ryan O'Gara's lighting all make real contributions to a remarkably accomplished production design.

But as for the rest of P.S. Jones and the Frozen City, I am at a total loss. The script is a scattershot series of limp jokes, none of which hint at any particular point of view. The dialogue is overloaded with profanity of the sort that typically heard in the schoolyard. "Cut the crap, monkey tits" is a typical example, along with the rampant use of "fuck" and "shit" in various grammatical positions. There are also fight scenes in which, each time a character lands a blow, projections appear, saying, "Pow!" and "Bam!", just as they used to do on the old '60s-era television series Batman.

I'll put up with any amount of vulgarity if the satire is headed somewhere, but satire requires a point, a critical attitude -- things that seem altogether missing from P.S. Jones and the Frozen City. The humor is largely of the children-acting-out variety -- How many times can a character say "fuck" in search of a laugh? How long can one stretch out a scene in which a character roots through a pile of excrement? How many laughs can an actor get from preening and mugging, even if the lines don't make sense? The play appears to turn serious in its final moments with a speech by the hero's mother, but it is so clichéd that I couldn't tell if it was just another joke. Speaking in Askins' version of an Oakie dialect, he says, "We's all fool. Victims of far-away movement we cain't grasp. We gotta make story and make story and bring up a hero and hate a villain. All of these stupid stops made after the fact. All these lies to explain now. So sing yer song boy." This is a joke, right?

Askins earned a lot of good attention last season with a play called Hand to God, which represented Satan as a trash-talking sock puppet. I didn't see it, and I'm sorry I didn't; it would provide a valuable point of comparison with the activities of P.S. Jones and the Frozen City. All I can say is, I feel certain that his current offering is one big piece of P.S.--David Barbour


(12 December 2012)

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