Thursday, May 08, 2008

Me

Kirk Wood Bromley's latest play, Me, doesn't really get to the heart of Mr. Bromley. (Unless we take his mash-up of placenta mythology, ecological warning, and fractious parents -- there's father, a hammerhead shark in a golden diaper, and a mother-as-sponge -- at face value. And that's not really the point of this comic play.) However, it does get to the heart of his style, with the entrance to the theater littered with the detritus of his past, from old props and clippings to epigraphs from his favorite influences. It's fair, then, to say that this is the sort of play I imagine John Ashbery might write if he were smoking peyote and unwinding on the guitar. It's a highly literate, linguistically comic, and utterly refracted, interrupted, and regurgitated work of theater. Well, just call me a baby bird then, 'cause I ate it all up, from the self-reference to the Joyce-worthy absurdism: "When someone's obliminal nodes excite your oceanic plasma, you are hookt." Job well done for director Alec Duffy, who somehow manages to keep the twelve actors playing Kirk fresh, interesting, and on point.

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