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The Doubtful Guests - Los Angeles, CA
CIF Fringe, WNEP Theater
Saturday, April 6, 2002
Reviewed by Jeff Catanese
True to their concept, The Doubtful Guests creep you out from their entrance. Appearing white-faced, with bits of dirt and blood peppering the make-up, they appear as the "four decrepit buffoons killed in a London brothel fire in 1888" that their program proclaims them. The improvisations they perform make you think you've wandered into an abandoned theater weeks after the nearby asylum closed down and let the insane loose. The entire show is gleefully off-putting.
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Todd Stashwick (once of NYC's Burn Manhattan) is the obvious ringleader of the troupe and he drives the great majority of the storytelling. Jason Ades, Sabrina Hill and EzraWeisz pick up on Todd's cues very well and propel the story and fourth-wall-busting asides into the strange and entrancing realms that they deserve to go. However, it is this follow-the-leader construction that keeps The Doubtful Guests just this side of perfection. When each player initiates their own direction it is often on a tangent that heads into dangerous or, worse, mundane territory, and, though the lapse is brief, it takes a moment or two to get the audience back on their side.
The commitment to the style is what really sells this show. Taking their influences from the illustrations of Edward Gorey and the writing of Edgar Allan Poe, among others, the Victorian London as Jack the Ripper may have prowled it, is joyously adhered to. Even the band (The Penny Dreadful: Weston Walls, Chris Schultz and Todd Adamson), dressed in Dickensian rags, adds to the atmosphere of outrageous carnival. The actor use the music wisely and allow the story to become secondary at times so that the audience can giddily revel in their antics.
Mr. Stashwick is now one of the premier performers of organic improv and with this ensemble he has created an able band of lunatics. Given a few more weeks of rehearsals and performances, these artists should have no problem establishing their own theatrical language of conventions and direction. Already a great show filled with the bizarre and deadly, next year, if they reappear, they will certainly be the toast of Chicago.