Of all the performing arts, theater has a tendency to be the most unbearable. You can easily walk out of most concerts, and with dance there's usually at least a certain technical proficiency to be admired. But particularly in small Off Broadway theaters—where, ironically, the potential for magnificence is greatest—it's almost impossible to escape without causing a major disruption. When theater stinks, which is often, you've usually got no choice but to suffer through it without anesthetic, as time slows to a crawl and your captors torment you with boredom.
You're Welcome., the latest offering from The Debate Society, a theater company seemingly incapable of producing bad plays, is a worthwhile parody of just some of the many ways in which a night at the theater can go terribly wrong. Their "cycle of bad plays" is an hour-long celebration of theatrical sins, beginning with a smug, self-satisfied director's speech that runs on so long that most of the first play has to be cut for time. (Thankfully, the ludicrously low-budget "Broadway-style scene change"—executed by a surprise army of limber, black-clad stage hands—is spared.) This is followed by a hilariously overwrought anti-drunk driving play, which skewers the info-drama we've all witnessed during school assembly at one time or another.
An absurd "stage reading" of a short play called Monster Trucks follows, and then it's on to the epic We Got A Fog Machine, which is itself comprised by a cycle of "playlets" written for the sole purpose of using their awesome new stage tool. But for reasons I won't spoil here, this ambitious masterpiece quickly crashes and burns, and after a spectacularly choreographed "ghost dance," we've soon arrived at the last bad play in the cycle, an atrociously paced, subtly-rendered satire of contemporary bourgeois drawing room drama. With its pretentious title, The Whispering Tree, this is the most naturalistic of the five, reeking with trivial cocktail party banter between three yuppie friends, climaxing with a beautifully banal monologue that's cut short by the best sight gag of the night.
The Debate Society is working on another new production for the Ontological Theater, where their greatest triumph, The Eaten Heart, wowed us back in 2007. You're Welcome. doesn't aspire to the transporting wonder of that coup, but the company's essential, idiosyncratic charm, embodied by effervescent lead performers Paul Thureen and Hannah Bos (well complemented here by actor Michael Cyril Creighton), remains irresistible. To cop a line from Jeff Daniels's pedantic professor in The Squid and the Whale, this is "minor" Debate Society, but it's still major fun, a delectable appetizer to tide you over until their next big entree.
Your Welcome. continues at The Brick Theater in Williamsburg through February 27th.
