If you like clowning-good old-fashioned pratfall — and-slapstick clowning — then you’ll appreciate the first production of rainpan 43 at the Studio Theatre, “All Wear Bowlers.” A collaboration by Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford, “All Wear Bowlers” is a goofy mythic journey of two lost souls who stumble out of a silent film wasteland into a theater with no exit.
Sobelle and Lyford, who act the piece they have written, pack an extraordinary amount of classic joking into the short time they are onstage. In addition to the breathtakingly accurate timing with which they morph out of the film and back in again, there are visual antics, vaudeville routines and sleight-of-hand, as items — from eggs to apples — appear out of nowhere.
But the jokes are a means to an end, and the anarchy is not there just to entertain. Using only a ladder, a glass jug, a newspaper and a small suitcase, the clowns Wyatt (Lyford) and Earnest (Sobelle) create a sense of total confinement in a world they can’t escape. They grunt more than speak. They communicate through gestures, not words. They are reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy trapped in a lonely landscape devised by Samuel Beckett: Behind one black curtain at the side of the stage is a brick wall.
Director Aleksandra Wolska has done an excellent job of playing up her actors’ strengths. Sobelle does some extraordinary physical cavorting, while Lyford does an extended pantomime as a huge, all-devouring monster. Together they do a hilarious ventriloquist-and-dummy act and push the notion of audience participation to the limit.
All the physical elements of this production are cleverly accomplished, especially the imaginative film by Michael Glass and the expansive sound design by James Sugg. Tara Webb’s dusty black suits and bowlers are perfect costumes for these two earthy creatures. Film composer Michael Friedman has created a lyrical, meandering piano score to accompany the lovable tramps on their journey, as they weave in and out of the world of silent film.
‘All Wear Bowlers’
By Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle
Part of the rainpan 43 Festival
» Venue: Studio Theatre’s Mead Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW
» Performances: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays to Sundays; 2:30 p.m.
Saturdays and Sundays
» Tickets: $34 to $57
» Monday: 202-332-3300,
www.studiotheatre.org
