Few Skidmarks at City Theatre's Undershorts
BY George Schiavone
Published: Jun, 2008
A fourth-grade teacher (Sally Biondi) shows her students her newest purchase: a loaded 9mm handgun in Craig Pospisil's "Guns Don't Kill."
Undershorts is one hell of a night at the theater. It’s such an awesome concept that you can’t believe a major SoFla theater company didn’t think of it before, and City Theatre is pulling it off with such aplomb and guttery grace that you can’t help feeling grateful that they thought of it first.
The idea is this: take all the cool plays that would have made it into Summer Shorts if they weren’t so filthy, stick them into a late-night program of their own, and encourage boneless drunkenness amongst the City Theatre punters until the isles of the Arsht’s big studio theater are filled with cross-eyed puddles of helplessly cackling humanity that were, until just a few moments before, respectable-looking SoFla theater mavens.
So Undershorts is not the deepest thing in the world, and nobody minds. Something about material this racy seems to energize its actors, directors, and audiences until everybody in the theater feels like an adventurer; an expeditionary into the artistic wilds where notions like “taste” and “propriety” hold no sway. There is a sense that you don’t know what you’ll find out there, and each little discovery and turn feels like revelation crossed with delight.
Which isn’t to say everything’s perfect. Of the eight Undershorts pieces, one is a flop (Savannah Reich’s “Time of Changes,” during which we witness an educational video about puberty devolve into an unfunny celebration of existential angst), and one is only mildly amusing (“Wood”). But the other six, though — holy shit!
It’s impossible to pick favorites because they’re all so good, and because Undershorts would be so much less satisfying without any of them. Both David Ives’ “Moby Dude” and Rolin Jones’ “The Mercury and The Magic” are unexpectedly heartwarming — in the former, an apparently stupid stoner kid (David Hemphill) wows his teachers with a deep and loving analysis of Herman Melville, while the latter follows two possums (Hemphill and Andy Quiroga) as they riff on the meaning of it all while dodging cars. Both seem to be emphatic assertions that beauty is where you find it, no matter who (or what) you are, and both are so gleefully delivered that you end up believing it, if you didn’t already.
