Dr. 2's surgery with patient (Not) Another Day at the Prop Thtr
Patient: (Not) Another Day
Legal Guardians: Playwright Jenny Magnus, Technical Wrangler Stefan Brün.
Surname: Curious Theatre Branch
Address: Prop Thtr [sic] 3502 N. Elston Ave
Insurance: PagePay Plus
Symptoms: plot hole, not whole, plot hole
Diagnosis: He-can’t-be-forced-to-leave
“He’s been on the show so long he’s an institution.”
Operation Overview:
Nurse… um… I was… confused. The patient was… experimental. It was fun. It didn't have a plot. That was the plot: to discover the plot. The actors were impressively involved in dancing out the confusion. They lived as the sporadic gears of a nonstop cuckoo clock. The show was poppin’ with eccentric energy that made me laugh out loud. I wasn't pleased, however, with the overall fragmented experience.
The television interludes of the soap opera that the Writer was editing were hilarious at times, but after the fifth round of intentional deterioration of the same episode, I was wondering if I was still watching a theater show. The wonkiness became hypnotic and served only to give authority to small thoughts in a haywire dialogue. Again, at first the irony was hilarious and curious, but then the giggles started to sag. Behind the wall of semi-musical freestyle, there was almost no content: not even a broad through-line. If there was one, I wasn’t invited to find it. A lack of plot, in a plot, about a lack of plot, is not the justification for its own lack of plot! The speech was pure madness; every paragraph was bloated with evil non sequiturs. Not more than three sentences in a row would make sense. This was my biggest peeve with this show and this genre, but perhaps I’m too Christian.
All actors onstage were darling, despite my distaste for the script. The virtue of the experimental theater is their freedom: the actors and MC brought the audience to ride on their desired wavelength. The rodeo started to die down after the high strung zingers lost their punch. My advice to the legal guardians would be more relevant free association that doesn't meander off the walls. I've prescribed some downers because the irony got scary with the peripheral wild sex in the holy chapel. Counterintuitively, this was when the performance was the most vapid. When the patient is ready to behave, I'll raise them up to three stars while other Freudian wizards may appreciate them at four.
