This weekend, the Under the Table Theatre Ensemble brought their show Fever Pitch, a political satire full of randomness and over-the-top self importance, to the Baltimore Theatre Project. The audience, primed with a great 15-minute show from comedy troupe the Loyal Opposition, was ready to take on this hysterical "dialogue" and "art show" presenting America and its state of affairs after Sept. 11.
The show is emceed by two characters, Clyde Hyde and Trish, who wear outrageous masks that turn their faces into caricatures of actual people. They want to make sure to involve each and every audience member into their activities, which makes them seem very much like guidance counselors who are about to tell you how to practice safe sex. They immediately explain that they are involved with the public relations-type part of the government and that the community might not understand how they feel about war, so they wanted to bring an Artist to the community to help this situation.
It turns out this Artist is a very plain looking man, who walks slowly and determinedly onto the center of the stage while the other two sit down on a couch. Walter Wenderley's, "Summer Samba," the ultimate elevator and supermarket song, comes on, and the Artist just moves his shoulder to the beat. This turns into a dance that is only paralleled by the final scene of Napoleon Dynamite, just the first of many hilarious scenes from the Artist.
Equally hilarious were Clyde and Trish, who used visual demonstrations for every concept they had. With over-simplification and slightly southern accents, they sounded as if President Bush had himself sent them to Baltimore to promote all the wonderful things that the government was doing. The best part of their explanations was how to tell if something was "Good!". Clyde acted out the part of Good, posing as a strong, reliable man, while Trish acted the part of Evil as a rabid gangly monster, claws and tongue out. They immediately turned this into a buzz-word type feeling exercise to distinguish the two which they called, "See it. Think it. Feel it. Know it." They kept referring back to this after they said anything was "Good!" with a two thumbs up.
After stealing a lot of the Artist's time, the two sit down and the artist gets back to work. In the next piece of the show he played the ukulele very well, and added a very high pitched nasal singing to the cute piece he played. The crowd was in uproar. After another lengthy interruption, the artist silently pulls a dummy out of the back of his jacket, sets him down, and places a tiny hat onto his head. He then takes a kazoo and an old metronome out of his pocket. While the metronome is ticking, he slowly leads the kazoo into his mouth, the ticking stops and he blows, "VOOOOO!!!." He puts the metronome into his pocket, puts the dummy onto his lap and makes his own ticking noises while leading the kazoo into the dummy mouth. "VOOOO!!!!" He then took a pennywhistle and tried to repeat the process, but was quickly interrupted by Clyde and Trish.
While listening to what Clyde and Trish had to say was very important for getting the message from the show, their raw performance was sometimes too hard to watch. Therefore, the Artist was the favorite character and protagonist of the show, as the audience started to feel annoyed at these characters for interrupting him with their silly nonsense. "The characters of Clyde and Trish already existed when we made this show. But we knew we couldn't make a show with just them. The artist was invented as someone to be interrupted," said Matt Chapman, co-founder of the Under the Table Theatre Ensemble. The two elements of the show complemented each other well in presenting this outrageous dialogue on the war and America
Ending with a song about how America whooped every single country in the world, the two smacked each others' bottoms with the refrain, "We whooped 'em!" This song was one of the most painful to hear, as it states the kind of American supremacist mentality that seems to prevail in society today, yet it maintained the same ridiculous hilarity that was present throughout the show.
"We created this show as a response to the responses of Sept. 11, specifically the lack of response from the art community. Because if people reacted, they did so with emotional devastation, but no discussion was happening about the politics behind it all," said Chapman. As if to mirror this notion, when Clyde and Trish leave at the end, all that is left is the quiet and slightly upset artist who chooses to do nothing about it, and hasn't said a single word during the entire performance.
The company is retiring the show, because as election time draws near, everybody has been talking about the various effects a nation geared towards terrotism, specifically about the political ramifications. Furthermore, more political comedy has been popping up, and so the effect of Fever Pitch is less noticeable. However, it was one of the best comedic dialogues about contemporary America that I've ever seen, and I am looking forward to what Under The Table Theatre will present to Baltimore in their next tour.
