Playwright: Joe Foust and
Richard Ragsdale
At: Defiant Theatre at the Chopin,
1543 W. Division St.
Phone: (312) 409-0585; $15-$18
Runs through: June 13
Action Movie: The Play is the third in a series initiated in 1998 with Action Movie, continuing in 1999 with Action Movie: The Director's Cut, and veering slightly in 2002 with Sci-Fi Action Movie In Space Prison. Defiant Theatre's recent attempts at conventional drama having met with wails of disappointment from audiences and critics alike, their return to what they do best seems only logical.
Joe Foust and Richard Ragsdale's sturdy spoof of bang-boom-pow-aaargh flicks has been slightly updated—a Terminator-style thug is now just a thug—but its replication of and commentary on the clichés of its testosterone-fueled genre is as timely as the product it mocks. For villains, we have Pike Calypso and Poison Innaman, henchpersons of corporate greedhead Kreegar, whose scheme for World Domination is on the brink of fulfillment. For heroes, we have the team assembled by the sinister Dr. Xylene—war veteran Stone Hardgod, tough cop Jack Jackson, bounty huntress Cyborg Woman, computer ace Alec Smarty, and mysterious Kung Fu Guy. Will these comrades expose the traitor in their midst and foil Kreegar's evil ambition?
Why ask? ACTION is what this is all about, and the sprawling dimensions of the Chopin mainstage open up vistas for fight choreographers Joe Foust and Geoff Coates prohibited in earlier productions. Back again is the car chase finishing in a chain-saw duel executed atop the moving vehicles, the dangle from the skyscraper, the five-on-one martial arts exhibition, the underwater wrestling match with the giant alligator, and the two-person bout with an aluminum ladder serving as the solitary weapon.
Back also are most of the original cast, as agile as five years earlier, reveling in their gleefully vulgar verbal and visual humor (in particular Michele Di Maso and Lisa Rothschiller, coolly engaging in gynecentric fighting tactics too risqué for the male-oriented violence found in mainstream cinema). They are assisted by such venerable low-tech devices as false-perspective scene painting, ingeniously crafted puppets, a head-banging original score by the UK band Prank, several black-clad Koken (Japanese theater's invisible 'prop men') and a quick-draw Foleyman Rick Lockett supplying an endless array of split-second smacks and salvos.