Audio By Carbonatix
Partway through The Squabble, I did something I’ve
never done before in all my years of faithful and happy attendance at
Buntport: I glanced at my watch to see how much longer we had to
go.
Based on Nikolai Gogol’s “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled
with Ivan Nikiforovich,” The Squabble tells the story of two
neighbors in a Ukrainian village who begin as inseparable companions
and become deadly enemies over a meaningless epithet flung by one at
the other. The original is grotesque, odd and almost surreal, poking
fun at rural society, legalism, bureaucracy and human nature. There’s a
nod to Romanticism, including a narrator who apologizes periodically
for not being more poetic, and the characters are broadly and absurdly
sketched.
Reading Gogol takes an imaginative effort: You have to try to
transport yourself into his time and place, guess at the manners,
politics and culture he’s mocking and adjust to his humor. (Someone
once said that reading literature in translation is like making love
through a blanket; I think this is particularly true of jokes.)
Instead, Buntport has transported the action to some fictive and
unnamed place that feels as if it’s halfway between the United States
and nineteenth-century Europe. The Ivans have become Bob
Boxinoxingworth and Bob Luggalollinstop; narration is provided in part
by the former’s pig. But this effort only occasionally captures the
flavor of the original, and the updated humor that the company’s
inserted — the names, for example; jokes about mints and bad
breath substituted for observations about snuff — aren’t that
funny. In a concept that could have been inspired, all the action takes
place in a huge trough of real mud — Buntport’s version of
Gogol’s “truly magnificent puddle” — on which the actors tromp,
shove each other and sometimes skid. They wipe their boots continually
on squares of cloth, which then get pinned onto moving clotheslines.
You can see what the company is going for: a representation of the
mean, mud-bound spirit of the little town where pigs and chickens
wander the streets, and also of the mud-wrestling between the
protagonists. But though the mud provides some good bits of business,
particularly for the fastidious Boxinoxingworth, it’s not really
integrated with the action. Nor is your very natural desire to see
everyone finally scrambling and wrestling in it ever satisfied. Even
though there’s no mud fight in the original story and it would be hell
on costumes, why provide such a tempting, squishy mess if you’re not
going to go all the way?
Erik Edborg and Brian Colonna certainly go all the way in the main
roles. These two actors create characters that are fully articulated
and insanely funny. Colonna, hugely padded, is a man almost immobilized
by his own girth, but makes up for it with a booming voice and an
almost desperate air of authority. (Colonna usually gives his
characters high, heady voices, so this is an interesting change.) And I
can safely say you’ll never see anyone in life or again on stage who
even faintly resembles Edborg’s Bob Boxinoxingworth. Wearing a girlish
curly wig and absurdly decorated coat, as thin as Luggalollinstop is
fat, he’s epicene without being effeminate in any of the usual ways,
and his crazed and precise mannerisms are an astonishment. While these
two are engaged in their quarrel, you’re riveted.
No one else has created a character this specific, however, and Evan
Weissman, Erin Rollman and Hannah Duggan, each playing two roles, end
up scuttling around the stage, making faces, using funny voices,
gesticulating and wearing silly wigs. Rollman, in particular, seems to
be utilizing sketch-comedy characterizations: Both the people she
portrays have irritatingly shrill voices; neither speaks as if thinking
the words before saying them. The Buntporters are hugely talented,
among the most hilarious performers around. Surely they know that
nothing kills comedy as fast as trying to be funny.
It’s very possible that Gogol is unstageable; in any case, mixing
the nineteenth-century Russian writer with Buntport’s comic
sensibilities simply never jells. A satire, the story has no forward
momentum — and on stage, as with the original — it grinds
to a sad, inevitable halt. Just not soon enough for me.
