Remaining performances
July 13 at 7:30pm; July 19 at 4:00pm; July 19 at 7:30pm

They say: You are cordially invited to celebrate the passé-ist glory of Futurist degustation: a tactile seven-course meal of gastronomic revolution. Those without suitable tactilist garb will be loaned one upon entry. Suggested $5 gratuity. R.S.V.P. or food-related concerns to info@banishedproductions.org

Sheffy says: You think you’ve seen “the Fringiest” show? A Tactile Dinner is off the map (actually, it’s literally off the Fringe map, and there are no signs outside to help identify the building, so make sure you write down the address). This is no show, it is an experience, and one I exhort you not to miss.

Dinner guests are greeted by the maître d’ and provided with appropriate dining attire (my “pjamas” were fashioned from tyvec and cork, the tactile sensation of the material being the key ingredient). According to a seating chart that is not immediately obvious, guests are led one-by-one into the dining hall where TV monitors display interwar era clips from fascist Italy (including an animation of goosestepping pasta). What follows is not only hard to describe, but any attempt to do so would dilute the experience. Let me just say that the seven course meal you are served adheres to the Futurist ideology, replete with “gustatory foreplay”.

The performers qua servers are virtually silent, but they preserve a retro sci-fi ambiance. Their original choreography enhanced the menu (or was part of the menu, I’m not exactly sure). If your behavior is inappropriate for the banquet, they will scold you, but they also serve as your guides to fully appreciating the meal with all five of your senses. The polyrhythmic salad, for example, is intended to be enjoyed by using one hand for feeding, and the other to crank the music box that is affixed to your salad “bowl”.

Although this was great fun, it’s the product of serious research on the part of director Carmen Wong. The menu (as well as the formal dinner attire) was actually based on The Futurist Cookbook, published in Italy in 1932. The movement sought to separate eating for nourishment from feasting for multisensory enjoyment. According to the program notes, diners often ate in a darkened room; they buried their faces in their food to activate the skin on their cheeks and lips. One recipe calls for roasting a chicken stuffed with ball bearings to bring out the steel flavor. While the Futurist Movement died with the Fascists, you can now experience their highest cuisine.

And, oh, go easy on the magically-flavored balls…

See it if: You’ve run out of interesting ideas for dinner parties and need a little inspiration.

Skip it if: You skipped lunch to save room in your stomach for your only meal of the day (according to futurist ideology the full stomach is the enemy because it attenuates one’s gastronomic attention).

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 19 @ 8 PM; Sunday, July 20 @ 3:30 PM; Wednesday, July 23 @ 7:30 PM; Saturday, July 26 @ 9 PM

They say: Manifesto!
Art movement. Political movement.
MANIFESTO! is DADA. Clown is HAHA!
Three clowns, two punk visionaries, and an impresario walk into a bar. This is not a joke! This is a spectacular divertimento to launch the next great movement! Inspired by the PAST, NOW is the FUTURE. MANIFESTO! excites everything!**

Brian’s take: Pearheads. Choo-choo trainsies. Hypnotic spiraling head expanders. Funny HAHA dancing. Wheeling typewriter impostors:::::::::::::::::::::Honky-tonk saw. Stand UP! sit down. (Bald-headed crystal ball). Balloon&Broom&Bicycle wheelie….

Those are just a few examples of the glorious nuggets of nonsense that comprise MANIFESTO!, the Happenstance Theater’s delightful romp through the surreal, unreal, anti-real, ethereal landscape of DADA. This superb ensemble cast, led by Mark Jaster and Sabrina Mandell, has taken snippets from texts across four schools of thought–futurism, communism, capitalism, and dada–and artfully fashioned them into an hour-long comedic revue in which, ultimately, dada seeps into and seduces all.

But MANIFESTO! is by no means a history lesson. In fact, it is perhaps the most deftly theatrical display of reading-in-between-the-lines I have ever seen: a multi- and extra-sensory extravaganza with insanely stunning visual imagery stitched together by rag-tag bursts of sound and slapstick.

The show’s creators have apparently drowned themselves in the complete oeuvres of these movements (futurism and dada especially)–not to mention the Chaplin-Keaton-Stooge schools of physical comedy–and they have come up for air only long enough to grab the audience and take it, to the theater-goers’ glee, back down with them to the dada depths. Their commitment to the underlying spirit of the work is unfaltering and their interpretation spot-on: they proudly present the political theater of nonsense, the divine poetry of gibberish, the artistic anti-war protest by anti-artists. Unlike many others who try this very challenging stuff (in this year’s Fringe and elsewhere), these merry pranksters get it.

Oh, and did I mention that MANIFESTO! is funny? Sure, Judd Apatow flicks are funny, reruns of Seinfeld are funny, this Onion video is funny, but MANIFESTO! is funny in a way that eludes most comedy today: it is belly-laugh humor. This rare comedic form bucks all shades of intellectualism; it is not predicated on post-modern or post-pubescent awkwardness, or social satire, or even plain old wit, but on the visceral feeling of what it is to laugh for the sake of laughing, to lose yourself in the delirious hilarity of a moment, to let a bunch of clowns have their way with you, to not worry yourself with getting the joke because you–and everyone else around you–are the joke.

HaHa.

See it if: You’re bored; you’re excited; you’re sad; you’re silly; you’re angry; you’re happy; you’re rich; you’re poor; you’re communist; you’re magical realist; you’re on the verge of death; you’re a newborn; you’re sick; you’re sullen; you’re sullied; you’re Santa Claus….

Skip it if: dadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadada.

**I must point out that in my opinion the Happenstance Theater has disproved Trey Graham’s previously posited theory that “the more artsy-fartsy the Fringe-brochure come-on, the more unbearable the show is likely to be.”