Theater Review - Poultry ‘n’ motion

In the new movie Borat, the provocative title character asks a comedy coach if it’s OK to make jokes about people “with the retardation.” The teacher, sensibly, points out that it’s considered unfair to make fun of individuals for things they can’t control.

??
But just because it’s uncool to make fun of the disabled, that doesn’t mean all humor is beneath or above them. Treating them as fragile plaster saints can be a form of unwelcome condescension. In Out of Hand Theater’s production of Nobody Here But Us Chickens, three Monty Python-esque one-act plays use wild, knockabout slapstick to find the common humanity in handicaps.

??
The title play opens on Alsop (Adam Fristoe), a man in tighty-whitey underpants crowing like a rooster: “My crowing drives away the night!” Flapping and strutting like the boss of the barnyard, Alsop launches into a monologue proclaiming his identity as a white Leghorn cockerel, and sneering at the psychiatrists who claim otherwise. His worldview gets challenged, though, with the arrival another would-be-bird (Justin Welborn). Is the newcomer really another chicken, or just a cunningly disguised shrink trying to trick Alsop into behaving “normally?”

??
The “cock-a-doodle-doos” give way to piercing martial arts cries in “More Than a Touch of Zen,” which features Carver (Welborn), a gung-ho judo teacher who strikes dramatic poses and pays lip service to Zen philosophy. Carver loses his cool when he discovers that his two new students (Brian E. Crawford and Maia Knispel) suffer from “spastic paralysis,” a condition resembling cerebral palsy. With constant tremors and twisted limbs, they’re the least promising pupils for a discipline that depends on physical harmony.

??
English playwright Peter Barnes finds surprising depth in what could have been a one-joke premise (akin to the old Dudley Moore/Peter Cook sketch about a one-legged actor auditioning to play Tarzan). Crawford and Knispel make endearing assurances about their mental toughness and longing for stillness. The play finds a hilarious resolution to their dilemma, crowned with the line, “Up until now, our handicap has always been a handicap.”

??
Barnes is best known for penning the brilliant, brainy script for 1972 cult film, The Ruling Class, which earned Peter O’Toole a Best Actor Oscar nomination. Barnes wrote Nobody Here But Us Chickens originally for radio in 1989 and at times elevates the silly conflict with scholarly asides about such legendary fowl as Chanticleer.

??
The highbrow flourishes shouldn’t put off possible audiences, however. The performance style of the body-slamming, hard-to-embarrass young actors will amuse anyone who’s ever laughed at a Will Ferrell or Jack Black movie. Fristoe, Knispel and Ariel de Man directed the play, and the high-impact action at times becomes a kind of bizarre choreography. In “Chickens,” the rival “birds” fly at each other in a fight that combines pro wrestling and a back-alley cockfight. “Zen” finds a constantly funny contrast between Carver’s taut poses and his students’ perpetual shakes.

??
The evening’s third offering, “Not As Bad As They Seem,” cheerfully embraces clichés of adultery in academia and bedroom farce: a college professor (Jeffrey C. Zwartjes) bedding his department head’s wife (Ariel de Man). Not until her husband (Tyler Owens) returns home do we discover that they’re all disabled, too, but to say anything more would spoil the show’s best surprise.

??
“Not As Bad As They Seem” emerges as the lesser of the evening’s three stories, feeling thematically smaller and more like a sketch than the other two. Though the three actors capture the physical challenges, they’re a little mannered, as if trying to play older, English roles without quite committing to those details. Nevertheless, the play earns points by suggesting that disabled people can pursue sex lives, cheat on each other and generally behave as foolishly as anyone else who deserves ridicule. Nobody Here But Us Chickens makes fun of people, but in spite of their disabilities, not because of them.