Everybody wants to be a rock star, perhaps none more ardently than theater folk, some of whom have been prodding the form toward rock since the sixties. Sam Shepard famously insisted that he wanted to be a rock and roll star, not a playwright; recently the likes of theater company Les Freres Corbusier and playwright Adam Rapp (who moonlights in a band) have expressed a sensible desire to tap into the Bowery Ballroom demographic.
The funky alt-theater company Banana Bag and Bodice (BB&B) has now gone so far as to turn their troupe into a meta rock band, The Rising Fallen; albeit one with a humorously fictitious history. (That’s one of their videos above.) In their current rock/theater hybrid, we learn that the only place the band can get gigs is on oil rigs; this is mainly due to the group’s female members and, of course, the way lonely Scandinavian oil men mistook the band’s name for a girly show. Using mostly direct-address monologues and simple, gloomy post-punk, the performers proffer an atmospheric peek into those long months on their first rig gig: the nightly concerts, the blowjobs and homoeroticism, the weird rituals carried out by hugging poles with Nordic iconography.
On a sublimely moody stage that simultaneously evokes an oil rig, rock club and crash pad, the show plods along with the detached, anti-narrative whimsy that’s become de rigueur for much of the “downtown” theater scene. (The scent of fresh toast that fills the space may or may not be a nod to Shepard's True West, but either way it's a nice touch.) While Jason Craig’s text hums with a surreal poetry, as a whole the sporadically amusing evening lacks vitality. I suppose the musical numbers are supposed to provide that, but when it comes to songwriting, the usually intriguing BB&B seems lost at sea. Though Joy Division fans will be pleased to hear echoes of Ian Curtis in Peter Blomquist’s deliciously rich baritone, it’s not enough to rescue songs that drift far too long in boring three-chord doldrums. This is a band that even the most inebriated barfly would have a hard time indulging; to sit in a theater without a cocktail waitress in sight makes for a long aural slog. Uneven as theater and pedestrian as rock, the show ultimately amounts to a fashionable hybrid running on fumes.
The Fall and Rise of The Rising Fallen continues at P.S. 122 [150 First Ave] through May 12th. Tickets cost $18.
