‘Lots of pee and cum all over the stage,’ says Judith Mendelsohn
DETAILS
Birds and Stone Theatre
Wednesday, June 18 - Saturday, June 21
More in: Theatre
Judith Mendelsohn isn’t the first to see Calgary’s conspicuously consumptive culture as craven corporate cockery, but as a clown, she is uniquely suited to bring out the absurdity in a town mired in oil money. Running alongside Trepan Theatre in Clowntown, a double bill of clown performance, Mendelsohn’s Bobby imagines a corporate Calgary citizen whose job is, literally, fucking the environment to death.
“[Bobby] is a corporate suit, and at the beginning of the show he’s at the top of the game,” she explains. “He’s exceptionally good at his work, which is to destroy things with the aid of his penis.”
In true Calgary fashion, however, boom precedes bust, and things begin to degrade. “In the midst of the show Bobby soon discovers that his penis is shrinking,” says Mendelsohn.
After her last clown show about the birthday party disappointments of her clown persona, Murky, Bobby is a marked change for Mendelsohn. Tackling explicitly political disenchantment with the raucous absurdity of clowning, the show owes its roots to Mendelsohn’s disenfranchisement with her hometown.
“I sort of woke up one day feeling the energy in the city,” she says. “There’s so much anger to the city, and looking at it, it almost seemed like it was a giant penis. What would happen if this penis began to shrink?
“You don’t have to look far to see many people suffering in the boom, and the piece is very much involved in exploring the social dynamics in greed and a desire to fulfill one’s gluttonous desires,” she adds. “So it pokes fun at the destruction, what’s happening to the arts in this city, what’s happening to our healthcare system, and the nature of oil and gas and its prevalence in this city.”
Featuring a live soundscape by the lovely Danielle French and characteristically childlike touches like a tricycle-turned-Hummer, Bobby may be political, but Mendelsohn has no designs on a sombre morality play. Though she cautions that the show is undeniably dark, she notes that clowning offers a particularly accessible medium for confronting political issues.
“The wonderful thing about the craft of clown in that it lends itself so nicely to be able to tackle dark notions and go places that are dark, scary and absurd because it’s a clown, and we’re often more forgiving of seeing a clown go through that rather than a replica of us,” she says.
Where Bobby uses clowning to confront the darker elements of Calgary’s boom, its opening act, Trepan Theatre’s Cat Lady, aims instead for human connection. Starring Aaron Coates and Cheryl Hutton, who recently performed as Parisian cataphiles in La Mexicaine de Perforation, the show is a metaphor for human connection, featuring a titular cat lady (Hutton) who finds that one of her heretofore fake cats (Coates), is real. Offering a gentler side of clown than its political counterpart, Cat Lady is a show built as much to amuse its creators as to amuse its audience.
“It’s pretty fun to be the outside eye and get [the performers] to go further and take risks,” says director Alice Nelson. “Something I think I get them to do is stupid stuff for my amusement, but sometimes that stuff makes it into the show. I laughed until I cried today, and they said, ‘Is that all right?’ And I said, ‘It’s pretty funny to me.”
From the warmth of a woman connecting to her cat to the predatory world of Calgary’s oil and gas industry, Clowntown is a work of consummate clown contrast — absurdity and reality, the sweet and the grotesque. And the result?
“Lots of pee and cum all over the stage,” advises Mendelsohn.
