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Speed
Freaks [film]
Unconscious
Motives of the Motion Picture Industry
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Review
by Jason Zinoman This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. This is your brain on lots and lots of really potent drugs, if you were already slightly psychotic to begin with and work with a gun-toting Amish man in an office full of recently killed amateur performers. Add some angry narcs and a slew of sudden suicides to the mix, and it's clear that Robert Cucuzza's jittery new diversion, Speed Freaks, provides enough fear and loathing–not to mention mind-altering substances–to satisfy any gonzo theatergoer. While Cucuzza wrote, directed, scored and starred in Freaks, his kinetic play retains an uncontrived, anarchic spirit, which is its greatest strength. Bumping into doors and twirling each other upside down, the bizarre cast of characters–which include a perky high-school freshman (Cristina Nunes) and six dancing bears–ricochet around Merope Vachliotis's scrupulously junky set like a bunch of dizzy vaudevillians. Borrowing from a number of popular sources, including mad-scientist movies and gory B horror, the play begins on the brink of imminent disaster. A fatal yet incredibly pleasurable drug has been pumped into Paw-Paw's Famous Canned Peas, causing mayhem and murder for vegetable eaters everywhere. Paw-Paw's twisted, bloodthirsty employees–the company's repressed leader, Ivan (Cucuzza); his love interest, Molly (the wonderfully wound-up Laura Kachergus); the plodding scientist, Karl (David Cote); and the conflicted Amish man, Jacob (Ryan Bronz)–are holed up in their office, waiting for an impending police raid. "I want to explode all over myself," the maniacally frustrated Cucuzza repeats throughout the play. While he never explodes in the way he would like, Cucuzza delivers a thrillingly cartoonish performance through a series of raving eruptions, in which the talented actor transforms himself into a vibrating, eye-popping, slobbering Tasmanian devil. While the virtuoso auteur is a tremendously watchable actor, as well as a splendidly clever choreographer, his thematic palette and ear for language are merely prosaic. Despite its hectic pacing, the play, lacking heft or resonance, does become a bit tedious. Like any good psychedelic trip, it peters out in the end.
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Review
by Charles McNulty Writer-director Robert Cucuzza's latest theatrical acid trip, Speed Freaks, takes place in the cramped headquarters of Paw-Paw's Famous Canned Peas. As head honcho of this rogue company, Ivan (played with demented, maniacal wit by the author himself) has schemed to pump a narcotic gas into his product, which has turned it into the number one seller. The drug, though, has been responsible for a rash of suicides–people jumping off their roofs after experiencing a bad batch of the vegetable. Apparently, the "chef" has been turning out a "pure" version of the recipe, a discovery that terrifies everyone except the boss, whose fiendish sexual appetite relies on increasingly heavy doses of the stuff. Molly (Laura Kachergus), the pert young blond assistant, and Jacob (Ryan Bronz), the Amish flunky, are routinely ordered to aid their captain in his ongoing attempt to "explode all over himself." In between puffs of his "private stock," musical entertainers are brought in for him to strangle. This erotic routine typically culminates in Ivan's masturbatory cry, "Tell me you need my ass," though no amount of validation (or even hacked-up body parts) can get the poor guy off anymore. Heavily indebted to Richard Foreman's performance aesthetic, Cucuzza's work runs riot in a similarly self- contained way. The rules of his world certainly aren't obvious, though they have a logic, no matter how sinister or depraved. If only the piece had more conscious depth, perhaps the cartoon violence wouldn't have been so enervating. As the actors get bumped and slapped and thrown to the ground, the frenzied enactment of druggie reality simply goes up in smoke. "Speed
the Plough" I am writing in respectful protest of Charles McNulty's unduly lame review of Robert Cucuzza ["Speed Freaks," June 8]. I experienced the show as a dizzying, thrilling ride through a mind at its brink. Speed Freaks managed to tackle one of the stalest, hackiest subjects of the '90s–serial thrill-killing–and infuse it with a sense of absurdity and empathy that seemed as wrong as it was delightful. I thought its hyperkineticism was beautiful, crazy, and fun. Charles McNulty is a smart, well-regarded critic. As a solo performer I have received both positive and negative reviews from him. I wish he were less enervated by the work that Downtown produces. |
