Playwright: Conceived by John Pierson, written by Kurt Chiang
Where: The Neo-Futurarium, 5153 N. Ashland
Phone: 773-878-4557; $15
Runs through: Sept. 29
BY Catey Sullivan
With The Fool ( Returns to His Chair ) , the Neo-Futurists do everything in their power to drive the audience from the theater before the roughly hour-and-40-minute, intermission-free performance ends. Conceived by John Pierson, this is a show with no plot performed in a theater so dark you can't see what's going on much of the time. And when you can see, the actors are wearing crates on their heads, thereby ensuring that nothing they do makes any connection whatsoever with their audience.
Not that there's anything to connect with anyway. Watching the Fool is an exercise in tedium. Here's what happens in The Fool ( Returns to His Chair ) : People on stage run around, squirt water at each other, climb giant stakes of crates, and go on lengthy, unfunny rants about the lives of J. Lo, Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie and Anna Nicole Smith. Sometimes they zip each other up inside large black body bags and hop around. Sometimes they wear white paper suits and squirt bottles of red water at each other. One cast member spends most of the show trying to make a fake bomb and wearing what looks like an extra-large adult diaper; another comes out in a baby blue prom dress and cries for five minutes about Owen Wilson. Occasionally, someone plays a series of screeching, off-key notes on a violin or squeezes some random notes out of an accordion.
Actually, everything here seems random, self-indulgent, abrasive and— above all—meaningless. Maybe the cast is having fun running around and climbing on crates and jabbering over the ear-splitting soundscape, but they sure shouldn't be charging people money to watch them do so. The topper comes when one of the actors delivers a lengthy monologue in Italian. Even the program is off-putting, with the credits written in type face that requires a microscope to read on slips of paper the size of fortune cookie fortunes. I shuffled through these slips of paper multiple times and still couldn't tell you who directed this exercise in boring idiocy; maybe there was no director—or maybe, understandably, he or she just didn't want to make themselves known.
The Neo-Futurists are billing this show as an examination of the history of fools through the ages, covering everything from idiot savants to the ancient tarot-traveling fool to the Muppets. It's nothing of the sort. The Fool ( Returns to His Chair ) gives audiences no reason to stay in theirs.
