Annex Theatre has put together a holiday-skewering, comedy triple header (called Annex Triple Header) that is emphatically not for everyone. From now until December 19, Friday and Saturday nights at the Annex bring you a blasphemous puppet show, a comedy competition, and a nunsploitation episode (tickets: $10-$12 each, or $25 for a triple header pass good for multiple nights).
There’s a distinct Gong Show vibe to the whole evening, except without the gong. If you know and love the Annex, you will laugh heartily and get raging drunk afterward in their bar as a means of support. If you haven’t been, this is an evening of fringe (in so many senses of the word) comedy, so be prepared. In many–if not most–ways it is highly inappropriate for children and pedophiles, because you wouldn’t want both in the same room.
[Pause for laughter]
[Wait for it…wait for it]
It Came From Under the Tree begins with three drunken, slutty, under-rehearsed elves with surprisingly good singing voices (Operadisiac, says the program, solving that mystery). They provide burlesque interludes between low-budget puppetry of the Nativity, Black Peter, a Michael Jackson/Grinch mashup, drunken uncles, and of course A Christmas Carol.
Highlights include a casting coup for Herod’s baby executioner, a ghost with a foot-odor fetish, and improvisational work with a tree ornament. Inexplicably, Harry S Truman appeared as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Brian Kooser’s puppets are magic, even if the jokes are hit-and-miss.
Lisa Viertel as Sister Bernadette (Photo: Annex Theatre)
Production values climb stratospherically for Penguins: Heaven the Hard Way. (I’m skipping the People’s Republic of Komedy “Comedy Fist Fight,” which was well attended, because it’s a “phrase-off” which will be different each night.)
Written by Scot Augustson and directed by the debonair Bret Fetzer, Penguins is primarily an excuse to play with dolls (who happen to be actors portraying priests and nuns). It parodies Dan Brown, any ’50s movie starring a priest or nun, and today’s moral battlegrounds.
It’s also ultra-lowbrow, extreme Catholic camp: Father Jones (Chris Dietz) is an intoxicating fount of profanity and collection-skimming corruption, and he meets his match in Sister Bernadette (Lisa Viertel), equally profane, who’s looking to upset the Church’s patriarchal apple cart. Fetzer keeps his cast moving full-tilt once the conflict is stated–after which it’s not so much drama, as an ensemble juggling act trying to keep Augustson’s balls of wacky aloft.
Chris Dietz as Father Jones
You wouldn’t think there’d be any thrill (perverse or otherwise) left in priest-and-nun exploitation, but Augustson mines the veins of altar-boy molestation and convent lesbianism with such fervor, he might win you over. It depends on how you react (a cackle is acceptable) when Father Luke tells one of the sisters, “I’d like to fill you with the Holy Spirit,” and she replies, “I’d like you to fill me with the Holy Spirit from behind.”
At the risk of looking too deeply into the shallow end, there were moments I wondered if Augustson has a heart after all: The scene where little old Catholic lady and pro-life stalwart Connie (Teri Lazzara) fails to make friends on the abortion picket line with fire-and-brimstone Baptist Chasta Haines (Viertel again) satirizes the industry of anti-abortion protests, but also creates a human spark (the yearning to be part of something, to gain a friend) that makes the cardboard Connie, for a moment, human.
Episode 2 has its premiere on January 29, 2010.