This play features the Zombie Apocalypse, an imitation of the noises Beaker (from the Muppets) would make while having sex, and a full on living room brawl between four characters who don’t seem to like each other very much.
I don’t know how to express its awesome side better than just listing those things. At many points, this play is just purely fun.
It has a dark side, though. You have to wonder at points why these characters even know each other, let alone why they would invite each other over to watch Labyrinth (or why any of them would be the type to want to watch Labyrinth in the first place). You get the impression it’s supposed to say something about the main two characters and the repressed homoerotic bond they seem to share, but it never really gets fleshed out.
Mostly, though, this play is a fun romp. It starts really slow, but picks up well enough after a few minutes. It’ll make you laugh.
The premise of this play is that the main character (unfortunately named Richard Cox) buys a Real Doll that has motorized and computerized parts. Dick is sort of like Lars from Lars and the Real Girl or the main character of 40 Year Old Virgin in being completely incapable of having a relationship with the opposite gender, and he seems to see a sex-bot as his only way to have a meaningful relationship with anyone but his mother.
We see the story in two parts intertwined: His childhood and the progression of his masturbatory habits and his life as an adult with his sex-bot, who evolves through software and hardware upgrades from a rudimentary dummy who can barely pronounce his name (‘Rich-Hard’) to a fully grown girl with desires and attitudes of her own.
The emphasis is, unfortunately in my opinion, placed heavily on the childhood story. It’s hard to watch this play without feeling like you’re being extremely voyeuristic into the author’s life. You feel a bit like Ceiling Cat, watching as he humps everything from magazine pages to his television (‘ZAP’) to his family’s couch cushions. I have trouble recommending this play mostly because it’s really hard to know how someone will take this.
The adult portion of the story, where we see his interactions with the bot and his mother (his bot eventually starts drawing baths for his mother) is, in my opinion, the real meat of the story, but every time it gets going we get yanked back to his wanking.
If you can handle that, though, by all means go. It is very funny. It’s just that it’s funny in a sort of sad and disturbing way.
The ending is both touching and extremely sad. I don’t want to give it away, though.
Addition tells the story of a young gay couple who decide they want a threesome to spice up their love life. The scenario gets a little out of hand, though, as they dive down the rabbit hole of polyamory into what they hope is a stable 3 person relationship.
The really brave thing about this play, is how it diverges from most media about alternative relationship structures by being a relatively light hearted happy story. My experience with stories about this sort of thing is that they tend to be morality plays.
It’s also interesting that the play is centered around gay men, as I think the standard image of a multipartner relationship tends to involve one-man many-women. It’s in danger of falling into the trap of perpetuating notions of gay male promiscuity, but manages to avoid it through the earnest nature of the characters. They never seem to be slutty, they just seem to have fallen into a new form of monogamy by accident.
Generally, I’d be a little more down on this play for its possibly over-optimistic ending, but in this case I feel it’s justified as a balance against other shows, movies, and plays I’ve seen about this subject. It’s really nice to see a lighthearted approach to it.
Also worth noting is the comedic performances by all the actors involved. You can tell there’s a certain rawness to their performances, but again the earnestness of the actors makes the sometimes nerdy humor (two of the characters are LARPers, for example) come off really well.
If I have one complaint, it was that the venue is new and the acoustics weren’t quite worked out yet. The fridges off in the corner kept kicking in and interfering with the vocals of the performers. This seems to have been fixed in shows I’ve seen since then at this venue.
The Fringe is coming up in a few weeks, and I’m super excited about it (more on that in a few paragraphs). Recently someone on an chat channel I sit in mentioned that he saw Philip Glass today.
To which I answered, “did he buy a loaf of bread?”
Explaining this strange response requires going back to August 1997 or so (might have been 1998). You see, my father worked in Edmonton while our family lived in Red Deer. One thing that could always be counted on in those days is that my father would be out experiencing the Fringe Festival in late August. His claimed record stands, as I understand it, somewhere north of 30 plays in one season. This is a lot of plays to take in in one week. I thought it was a strange habit and didn’t really get it at the time.
Well, I was up in Edmonton visiting him and at the same time getting my first taste of the Fringe experience myself. One of the plays I saw was this one, as part of a series of shorts (don’t worry, it’s not long — just 5 minutes. Stick with it to the end):
This play, and all the other David Ives’ plays that were performed as part of this set entranced me. It was probably my first real experience with stage performance, and it was love at first sight. I’ve since seen a lot of plays, both at the Fringe and outside of it, and my love of stage theater has only increased since that experience. Especially small, short, quirky plays like this one. This play makes words dance in a way I’d never thought possible, and that is very powerful to an avid reader like me. It’s like interpretive dance (which I can’t get into at all) but for book nerds.
I’ve been back to the Fringe at least 5 of the intervening years, seeing anywhere from one play to my record of somewhere around 20 a couple years ago. Every year when I get my grubby hands on the Fringe guide, the first thing I do is search through it for any sign of a David Ives’ set. Someday, someone will do it again, and I’ll be there day one to see it.
But this leads to the really interesting thing I’ve learned about the Fringe, as well as myself, in all these years. I should explain that in the printed form, this play is very vague. There’s little stage direction, mostly just words. This leaves it highly open to interpretation. I suspect that every performance of this play is quite different, and looking at all the different youtube videos that suspicion seems to be the case. The one linked above is the closest to my fragile memory of what is to me the original of this play, but others may find other versions superior.
What I’ve learned is this: The beauty of the Fringe is the unique experience. No other entertainment venue I’ve ever experienced is so thoroughly dedicated to providing new, fresh, and unique experiences. Films are mass created for a mass market pretty much by nature. Music is likewise generally created always with the goal of the mass market in mind, and festivals around music are generally designed to pick out the next piece of the collective unconscious and give it wider voice.
But not the Fringe. Although I’m sure fame and glory are in the minds of more than a few of the playwrights, performers, etc. at the Fringe, it seems there’s an effort to create something special and unique, often deliberately designed to not function well as a mass market piece. The actors and playwrights may go on to bigger and better things, but their little Fringe plays rarely seem to. In that sense, it’s a venue for talent and not so much for product.
And that’s what I love about it. That’s what gets me back every year. It is my little rebellion against the collective consciousness, seeing things very few other people will ever see. Even fellow fringe lovers are unlikely to have seen the same segment of the hundreds of plays on offer as I did.
I’m gonna warn readers of my blog now: In a couple of weeks, there’ll be a lot of posts about plays I’m seeing. I do it every year, and this year will be no exception.