Metro Pulse/Backstage/All in the Timing

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What:
All in the Timing

When:
Through June 15

Where:
Clarence Brown Theatre

Cost:
Call 974-5161 for show dates, times, and ticket prices

All in the Timing hysterically proves that linear thinking isn't always a comedic asset

by Paige M. Travis

Imagine the most abstract, random hypothetical situations you've ever conjured up. Depending on the limits of your imagination or the number of alcoholic beverages down your gullet, the results of this flight of fancy could be unprintable or otherwise untellable, one of those "you had to be there" moments that never translates the same way again. Now imagine these fantastic imaginary scenarios turned into six short plays, fully realized with props, sets and good actors (all your fantasies deserve good actors). This is what David Ives' All In The Timing is like: a collection of wildly imaginative answers to "what if" statements realized to the fullest bounds of what physics and human comprehension will allow. The play is ridiculously genius and surrealistically hilarious. More out-there than Picasso at the Lapin Agile but not as out-there as Betty's Summer Vacation, for those of you keeping score at home.

For its final production of the season, the Clarence Brown Theatre has brought together some of the best and brightest of familiar faces under the direction of Ron Bashford. Having last appeared at the CBT as John and Goody Proctor in the über-serious The Crucible, John Forrest Ferguson and Bonnie Gould are surprisingly funny in their roles. Gould produces amazingly accurate monkey noises and arm flailings in "Words, Words, Words," a sketch that explores the theory that monkeys typing for infinity will eventually crank out Shakespeare's Hamlet. "What's Hamlet?" asks one of the primates. "How am I supposed to know? I'm a chimp!"

Ferguson plays a hyper, barely-intelligible professor in "The Universal Language," and then (with even bigger hair) in "Variations on the Death of Trotsky" with a huge pickax planted in his skull.

The audience favorite on opening night seemed to be "Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread," featuring a wild-wigged David Brian Alley as the composer. You may know Glass' musical compositions from such film soundtracks as Martin Scorcese's Kundun, Mindwalk and the Errol Morris documentary The Thin Blue Line. If you don't think you know Glass, the sketch might jog your memory, and even if it doesn't, the absurdity of the piece is hysterical nonetheless. To see the many ways CBT-favorite Tony Cede�o can wield a three-foot wire whisk is priceless and possibly the height of the night's physical humor. Although, Matthew Detmer comes a close second as a cool dude with Los Angeles attitude in "The Philadelphia."

From the bleach-blond hair, shades and polyester shirt down to his bell-bottoms, Detmer exudes L.A. '70s-style, and his body contortions resemble Seinfeld's Kramer and elicits just as many laughs. This piece suggests that people can stumble into a pocket of reality in another city, like Philadelphia, where to get what you want you have to request the exact opposite. Carine Montbertrand plays a sympathetic diner waitress who's "been stuck in a Baltimore all week."

Illustrating Ives' brightly absurd universe are scenic designer Takeshi Kata and costume designer Nanzi Adzima. Each one-act has a distinctly different feeling surrounded by the same kind of atmosphere, a brightly illuminated other-worldliness (enhanced by lighting designer Matt Richards). From the instant the play's action starts with "Sure Thing," the sense of contradictions—expect the unexpected—is established: a man walks through the doorway in a wall painted like the sky—blue with fluffy clouds—shaking his umbrella as the sound of rain and thunder are heard. As the play progresses, the set is dissembled to reveal another layer behind—a coffee shop becomes a scientist's lab becomes a classroom and a bakery, a diner and the Mexico City suburb home of a Bolshevik revolutionary.

Equally genius and ever-so-subtle are the eras evoked through the costumes. Trotsky's death takes place in 1940, and the other pieces are each given their own time-frame even though the text doesn't deem it necessary. The humans-dressed-as-monkeys-dressed-as-humans wear flared '60s garb in bright colors, and the Unamunda classroom in which sweet, stuttering Dawn comes to learn the new "Universal Language" is set in the wholesome, idealistic '50s. Only the first piece, "Sure Thing," in which Detmer tries a variety of approaches to pick up Montbertrand at a coffee shop, is clearly in the present. Philip Glass' decade must be the '80s although its surreal quality could put it in another universe altogether. This clever design touch really enhances the production visually and perhaps makes the dialogue and the actors' deliveries even funnier, as in the case of polyester-clad Alley and Detmer in "The Philadelphia."

As I have proven, All In The Timing is hard to describe without it sounding like a Salvador Dali painting, which isn't a bad comparison, actually. We're talking madcap, Monty Python territory here. During several moments my brain tried to analyze too much and started to freeze up; I couldn't even tell if something was funny because it was nearly too ridiculous to comprehend. My advice: Just sit back, let go and let the insanity overtake you.