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Entertainment should strive to provide what the audience wants, but not in the way they expect.
Or if they can’t be bothered, just some hackneyed trash will do.
The Aux Dog Theatre has selected “Boeing Boeing,” a 1960s French sex farce, as its oddly dated choice for its current production. The only real surprise for the audience is how the production is such a clumsy, embarrassing mess.
Cartoonish stock characters perform sloppy, awkward attempts at slapstick and mostly scream their lines in bizarre attempts at humor.
It’s a bit like a child leaping around in front of a TV or the class clown whose wild attempts at public humor are as lame as they are perplexing.
The actors are constantly turned it up to 11, and never take a breather or chance at variety.
And no amount of prevalent 1960s miniskirts can save it. The script is trashy and trite and no attempt is made by the performers to experiment, comment or elevate the content.
How this bewildering monster of a production managed to bloat and wail its way into existence is mystifying at best and shameful at worst.
The show runs an absurd three acts with two full intermissions, totaling almost three hours. This isn’t “Lawrence of Arabia.” It’s a base slapstick about polyamory. There is no conceivable reason it should be nearly three hours.
Even the tired, predictable premise holds no tension or surprises.
Test yourself if you can see where this is going: An American man living in Paris is d ating three airline stewardesses simultaneously. He explains to his painfully stereotypical dweeb pal that they fly into and out Paris so often that they’re never around at the same time.
Rather hard to say, really.
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The play is a whole three acts, after all. So maybe a war will break out. Perhaps a saga of their child and their children’s children, like a French “East of Eden.”
No, not really. The three ladies are going to actually be there all at once. Hard to believe, but it’s true.
The worst part of the premise is that the play goes nowhere. It spirals slow and vapid down toward the dull inevitable. One look at the set and then within the first few minutes during which the premise is explained, and you can see it all: women popping in and out of doors. Men running around waving their arms and babbling unrealistic lies.
So zany you fear your head might pop.
And you hope that something else will be done. Something unpredictable and sudden beyond the wacky visions of prophesy. But you’d be wrong. Dear God, you’re wrong.
People left in the second intermission with almost a full hour left of the running time. It’s really hard to blame them.
When the “rip-roaring” finale arrives nothing really happens. The plot dutifully ends, having run its course of falling over enough times to be satisfied.
It also fails to reason that since the polyamorous protagonist sees women as so easily replaceable, complete with an airline pimp who feeds him a bounty of new foreign stewardesses semi-constantly, that it really isn’t such a big deal if he is ultimately busted in his finagling.
The women are represented as flat clichés of an American, Italian and German. The dated racism lacks self-awareness or insight and produces only eye-rolling monotony.
“I’m getting on your nerves,” one howls at one point.
Why, yes. Yes, you are.
There isn’t a single performance in the show that isn’t the result of creative poverty.
So who’s really to blame? The script and/or whomever selected it? Those with the most creative control, who just couldn’t stop themselves from going completely overboard? Those who got to watch the “Boening Boening” crash crash and burn burn from afar, saying nothing?
Really, it’s everyone. Theater is a collaborative process. It succeeds or fails on the backs of everyone involved.
And you too, if you see it. Unless you’ve got three hours to kill and a pronounced sense of morbid curiosity. And in that case, go right ahead.
“Boeing Boeing”
By Marc Camoletti
Aux Dog Theatre
3011 Monte Vista Blvd. N.E
Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. Sundays at 6 p.m.
Runs through December 1st
$22 at door – $18 online advance
Visit auxdog.com or call 254-7716 to make reservations.
