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Diary of an Overbooked Theater-Festival Surfer: Week Two
Puppets, worms, toilets, and a really aggressive Shakespeare take.
Before the show is over, we’re going to see Amy kill Tim in, as Shakespeare once put it, “a hundred and fifty ways.” They’re both in mo-cap suits, and Romein — who is, among other things, a video-game fanatic and a serious coder — has created a roulette wheel of digital scenarios for them to play out, their Sims-like avatars projected in real time on a screen at the back of the stage. Each of its various physical bits runs on for minutes past its sell-by date (think Peter Griffin versus the chicken with less escalation), and the few instances of gesturing to a through-line that isn’t just poop jokes — one that has to do with isolation, regret, bodily breakdown, and fear — don’t really accumulate or stick. In one of the most vulnerable, bittersweet sections of her show, she reenacts a performance that “little John” gave for “Mother and Father”: Wearing only underwear and long socks flapping from her hands, she cavorts around the space, wiggling ecstatically, sharing her grand “experiment in freedom.” It’s a perfect invocation: Who didn’t do a version of this dance as a kid?
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