>>PREVIEW
STOP NOT GOING
Pajama Men
High Performance Rodeo
Runs January 21 and 22
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Sketch comedy has always been a favourite staple of the stage, but it simply doesn’t have the cachet of a full-fledged play. But a balance between the two? Well, that’s a performance of another stripe entirely.
An Albuquerque, New Mexico duo have been striking just such a balance for more than seven years now, adopting a new name along the way after coming under contract with The Second City. Now bringing their fifth show, Stop Not Going, to the High Performance Rodeo, Pajama Men are poised to give Calgary audiences a taste of theatrical ambivalence.
"(The producers) never really know what category to put us in," says Shenoah Allen, one-half of the pajama-clad pair. "Do they decide to throw us into the sketch-comedy category that does have a bad rap, or theatre, where theatregoers or companies may see us as too ridiculous?
"We lean toward the theatre side," he adds. "We don’t try to do sketch comedy, though at some point it’s just semantics."
While touring the fringe circuits with their Sabotage series, established under the auspice of their theatre company, burning cities new works co., Allen and his partner Mark Chavez have garnered awards and critical acclaim, even if those same reviews may still struggle to describe the act itself. Weaving characters like the twin Nigel brothers through multiple storylines that cut a tangential course through two acts, their show also affords both performers considerable freedom to improvise. The two men, who are former members of the Albuquerque improv ensemble DAIDA, say that the freedom to dynamically alter their work must be tempered by careful consideration.
"I guess I personally feel like having a road map sometimes makes it even easier to be spontaneous, because you have a bit of ground to stand on, in the same way that jazz is done," says Allen. "You have the standard and (you) stray from it, and you always have that beat to come back to."
"You can’t fake spontaneity," adds Chavez, who, in addition to performing as part of Pajama Men, has also directed another show for this year’s Rodeo, Monster Theatre’s The History of the Future. "The audience can tell when you’re lying to them."
The result is a creation that continually incorporates audience reaction, building on the initial collaborations between Allen and Chavez that generate the shows. After years of working together, stretching back to high school, the two have formed a chemistry that they’ve learned to rely on, even if the direction they’re given by the audience remains an essential part of their performance.
"Often our show will reach a real loose stage, running in at 70 minutes with tons of improv," says Chavez. "We start to become a little too relaxed and have to rein it in."
It’s an important consideration for an act that wants to do more than just sketch comedy. Drawing multiple characters and storylines together into a cohesive whole that isn’t a standard plotted play has become a Pajama Men signature, along with their pajama attire and the simple folding chairs that provide their set dressing. As Chavez points out, simple sketch comedy can leave an audience hanging for 10 minutes on a failed joke completely unconnected to the overarching show, a trap he and Allen carefully avoid.
"There’s always something to go back to," he says. "We’ll start off, introduce five storylines and then, just as soon as you’ve forgotten about a certain part of the story, we go back. Maybe one of the characters (the audience) like is back, and that way, when it takes maybe too far of a left turn, they’ll have that to bring it back to a tangible place. It becomes earned laughter."
The duo’s Rodeo show, potentially to be followed by a London gig, will cap hundreds of previous performances, during which their unusual play-sketch fusion has proved a perfect fit with fringe audiences and the men themselves. Even their name change, made when they signed with venerable comedy institution The Second City last year, has turned out to be apropos. As it happened, a description of their attire was also the most accurate depiction of their style.
"Sabotage didn’t necessarily describe the work we did," says Chavez of their previous moniker. "It was Second City’s opinion that what we did was not at all aggressive or violent, but very dreamlike and tangential and not sort of hard-edged. We rarely cuss in these shows – we try not to go down to those lowest common denominators."
Having a name that simply described their appearance "was sort of taking out the middle man," he adds philosophically. "What’s in a title anyway?" |
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