Shel's game is 'Crate'
comedy
(New York Post, Wednesday, February 13, 1985)
By Clive Barnes
IT ALL starts with a terrible - but very
lucky - mistake. A playwright asks a
director to get him some "great" actors.
He mis-hears, and gets the playwright
some "crate" actors - actors
accustomed, and indeed normally
contracted, to act in a crate!
That is the premise of Shel Silverstein's
zainly madcap and nuttily funny
assortment of playlets and songlets
which has just opened at the Ensemble
Studio Theater, and which he calls with
a logic which does him more than
justice, "The Crate."
I really loved this show. It went on too
long, some of the jokes were
repetitious, and even the best of the
humor was short on subtle and long on
childish - but I truly loved it.
I erupted into internal giggles at the
beginning, and I was still gastrically
gurgling - as it were - at the end.
Silverstein is, I suppose, best known as
a cartoonist, and best selling book
purveyor, but I still recall an ornately
hilarious one set play he once wrote - it
was actually given here at one of the
Ensemble Studio Theater's fascinating
annual fiestas of one acts - called "The
Lady or the Tiger."
Like this revue it went too far. And like
this revue it went too far with style and
energy.
In "Crate" Silverstein has opted for a
series of blackout sketches,
interspersed with a few none too
seriously decomposed songs. The
sketches range from a "Dracula" with
social significance and sound liberal
values, to an accommodating genie
popping out of his bottle only to find an
unresponsive master who wants so
little that he won't even let him switch
his black and white television for
color.
Some of the best jokes could do with
editing - a frenetic cheerleader giving a
lecture on her craft or a panhandler
trying to auction a "special sure-hit
song-writer's pen." These were fine in
concept and performance, but the
concept was stretched to thin.
Yet a country-western duet of "Hamlet"
was right on the button, a skit about an
explorer daring a curse by stealing the
emerald eye of a sacred idol proved
beautifully maintained, even though the
punchline could be seen a mile off.
Silverstein is much obsessed with
sadomasochistic humor - such as a
father giving his daughter a birthday gift
of "a dead pony," then maniacally
torturing her mentally until he reveals
the actual gift.
And imagine a French nouvelle cuisine
restaurant, where a diner asks for
French toast, imagines, to his horror,
that he has been served French toads -
it is another auditory mix-up like
"great" and "crate" - and finds, to the
audience's horror, that he has been
served French tocal. That is sicker than
the idea of frogs on tiny crutches
leaving a restaurant called La
Grenouille.
So let me stress that you probably have
to be on Silverstein's peculiar
wavelength to appreciate hi particular
vibrations. It seems that I am - and
certainly his director, Art Wolff, and
his very talented cast particularly
resonate to his bizarre craziness.
His cast - five men and three women -
are all amiably certifiable as certainly
something. The three who impressed
me most were Howard Sherman,
Robert Trebor (a positive palindrome
of an actor) and Janit Zarish. But even
as I write that, I am aware of my gross
unfairness to the other five, Bill
Cwikowski, John Fielder, Heather
Lupton, Deborah Reagan and Raynor
Scheine.
We should hear more from most of
them, and alot from some of them.
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