Ooh, those bedroom eyes. The Pajama Men have the best dress code.

DETAILS

24th Annual High Performance Rodeo
Big Secret Theatre
Thursday, January 7 - Sunday, January 31

More in: Theatre

Let’s try a working theory on sketch comedy: Arcs are the difference between even the best sketch and a piece of theatre. A sketch might be able to take an idea and twist it into impressive knots, but its world and characters remain basically unchanged. A play, on the other hand, must always show change. Make sense? All right, now toss it out.

The Pajama Men, Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez, have built a career on straddling distinctions between sketch, improv and arc-based theatre, switching between characters and scenarios with dizzying speed and without ever losing hold of the threads. The pajama-clad duo have already appeared twice on One Yellow Rabbits’ stage, first at the 2005 High Performance Rodeo (Stop Not Going) and again as an OYR mainstage act in 2006 (In Fine Form). Their latest, Last Stand to Reason, is set on a luxury train called the Stanton Bullet and features live accompaniment by Albuquerque-based musician Kevin Hume.

The show also includes the ghost of a little girl and an “indescribably ‘cute thing’” — a cast of characters created using only the performers’ bodies — but The Pajama Men are the first to concede that their plots are never as important as their play.

“The plot is there but it’s thin,” says Allen. “It’s just an excuse for us to act ridiculous.”

Ridiculous or not, the duo’s oddball characters and the narrative threads they’ve strung together are what make the shows so original.

Originating from Albuquerque, The Pajama Men have gone from a money-losing freshmen performance at the Edinburgh Fringe (which also happened to earn them a Perrier award nomination) to a coveted contract with Second City and, recently, a second sold-out stint in London’s West End after the success of their earlier show, Versus vs. Versus. In fact, the run at London’s SoHo Theatre was so successful that it required a week to be trimmed from their Rodeo appearance. Good news for The Pajama Men, but bad news for dawdling Rodeo patrons.

Beyond international acclaim like a prestigious Barry Award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the most important development between the pair is their preternatural connection. After 16 years of collaboration, The Pajama Men have been together almost half their lives.

“I haven’t even thought about it,” admits Chavez, 32, who met Allen when he was 16. “I have known him half my life and it’s only going to be a smaller percentage as I go on, so I should really appreciate this.”

“I don’t know what else to compare it to. We’ve become siblings in that way,” adds Allen. “We can anticipate each others’ moves. But we can still surprise each other, and that’s exciting.”

“I want to carry on the relationship,” continues Chavez. “I think it would be stupid not to.”

“We’re in pretty deep,” finishes Allen.

But if The Pajama Men are invested in their chemistry, they’re not so deeply invested in theatre (or sketch) that they can’t consider other media. Lately, the pair has been pitching two TV shows in the U.S. — one live action and the other available as an animated short on the duo’s MySpace page — though they feel that recent progress in the U.K., including a potential radio deal, might be a better fit. An increased focus on more script-based work would require that the pair spend less time touring and more time at their keyboards, but it’s a sacrifice they’re willing to make.

“It’s a challenge,” says Chavez of the transition. “We can’t just take our shows and film them and say ‘It’s a TV show.’”

“We lose something and gain something,” agrees Allen. “We lose this world inside the audience’s imagination, this thing that’s so great about theatre, that obviously can’t translate into television. What we gain is all these subtle nuances.”

For a pair known for outrageous facial and physical contortions, subtlety would certainly be an intriguing switch, but the Pajama Men are betting that there won’t be anything subtle about the mass appeal of mass media. And if the gambit is successful, who knows where their arc will end?

“We spent four years in Edinburgh, fighting to the top to get noticed, and although our reputation helped us start doing well in London and Australia, the wave of theatre is not as far reaching or as fast as television,” says Chavez. “It’s just the way it is.”

“We’ve been up-and-comers for 10 years,” finishes Allen. “But we keep the dream alive.”