If ever a show were certifiably insane, the world premiere of Burn the Red Banner: Or, Let the Rebels Have Their Fun might be it. At the Abreact performance space, playwright Franco Vitella’s forty-some short comedies provide the springboard for director Frannie Shepherd-Bates’s overripe imagination. The production’s framework morphs these absurdly funny snippets into a farcical torrent of merriment, for which no swipe at humor is off limits.
Vitella’s script is what might happen if David Ives and Anton Chekhov’s respective catalogs had a litter of baby-plays. Fallaciously entrenched in mother Russia, the sketches provide mere flashes of interaction, pared-down glimpses of lives whose extreme agony and malaise are almost apologetically funny in the absence of context. The cast of four (Steve Xander Carson, Jonathan Davidson, Keith Kalinowski, and Kirsten Knisley) dons and drops characters with alacrity, finding life’s little indignities and inconsequential exchanges alike to be positively fraught with meaning. It’s the richest source of parody for this genre, and Vitella skips directly to it several dozen times. A few archetypes and recurring characters slip in for a little sense of order, but not enough to be mistaken for story continuity: there is no plot. Instead, the vignettes prey on the worst, blandest generalizations of Russian storytelling, dabbling in rebellions and thickly accented authority figures. The artifice is intentional, smartly self-aware, and written — and played — strictly for laughs, which it earns in no small measure.
As though these souciant mockeries weren’t enough, the larger play in which these mini-plays resides is a thing of wonder. The audience is treated to the “Russian” performers’ muttered interactions and responses between plays, imagining the kind of scrawny, dissident company for whom this exhibition might actually represent some kind of misguided political propaganda. However discombobulated, the backstage material is clearly just as calculated as the onstage stuff: practiced and thought through, but always with room around the edges for further clowning. Because the supposed transformative power of the players’ efforts is abortive, the perceived import of the work becomes both sadder and more humorous by leaps and bounds; because this brash troupe is not intended to be especially prepared nor its material terribly polished, the hissed reminders and petty commentary in the dim between scenes makes the show’s every moment riotous fun. Each stoic, well-meaning disaster breaks into a melee of darkened chaos, complete with the misplaced tootling of Shepherd-Bates’s sound design, after which the resentfully indifferent voice of stage manager David Woitulewicz bellows the number and title of the next offering and self-important order is, however briefly, restored.
Although accents inexplicably wane at times, the ensemble as a unit shows keen understanding of the material, working together on all levels with both spontaneity and flow. What unfolds starts to appear like a friendly competition to push every potential to its comic limit, a challenge that each actor eagerly accepts, but the ultimate benefit is to the team. In a sea of characters and scenarios, however, one emerges as the most memorable and humorous: Davidson’s tentative Charlie Brown of a wallflower, who packs layers and layers of range into his mousy impassiveness until his guffaw-inspiring visage becomes the show's clear standard-bearer.
If there’s one drawback to Burn the Red Banner, it’s that the liberal exploitation of the show’s comic potential actually crowds out the scripted comedy of the individual plays. With all the pageantry of preparation, development of this sad band of players, and milking of setups and preposterous line delivery, the production shouts over whatever humor was on the page, until the amusing futility of the vignettes themselves feel like an afterthought lagging behind the shrilly hilariously concept they inspired. However, faced with eighty minutes of abrupt and rolling laughter, such criticism is akin to complaining that one’s ice cream sundae has too many toppings. To which this monstrously silly, unruly, rule-breaking craze of an amusement would not hesitate to admonish its viewers: Shut up and eat your ice cream.