PLAY: FRINGE, "bombs in your mouth"

Photo/John Scott

The bombs in the mouth from Corey Patrick's provocative title turn out to be nothing more than a poetic usage of popcorn, but the play is still plenty provocative. Bombs in your mouth is a compact comic drama about half-siblings reuniting in their Minnesotan home after six years to grieve the father neither of them loved. It isn't long before they start grieving their own more important failures, abetted by a few beer-chugging contests, some scatological childhood memories, and the sort of raging emotions that put the fun in dysfunction.

Patrick's script doesn't explain the dementia that led their father to write his memoirs on a roll of toilet paper, Kerouac style, nor the sudden snap that made Lily (Cass Bugge) write one of her ad spots as a whore thanking Valtrex for reducing her herpes long enough to get her bent over a table every now and again. Instead, the story puts us in their shoes, surrounding them with the frightening detritus of a life half-lived: cold spaghetti with tomato sauce and ketchup, Jello mold, beer, and Vikings blankets. It's not apparent at first what particular stick is up Danny's ass (Patrick), until we learn that his life--his entire world--goes only as far as the Pump 'n Pay he works at. He's not an alcoholic so much as a survivalist.

The greatest accomplishment of bombs in your mouth is how quiet something so raw can be. Director Joseph Ward understands what so many people in charge don't: that the sincerity of not knowing is a powerful, sympathetic, forgiving notion. As a result, there's not a moment that isn't focused and crisp, even if many of those moments are either nonsense arguments that rise out of agreements or are broken confessions of uncertainty. For all that the show yo-yos from highs to lows, Ward and his cast make it look more than natural: they make it plausible. By the end of bombs in your mouth, it's not just the squalling siblings who love each other: we love them, too.

PLAY: "A Guy Adrift in the Universe"

All those philosophically numbing plays getting to you? Do you feel lost or confused, not just by the theater you've gone to see lately, but by life itself? Larry Kunofksy's A Guy Adrift in the Universe has to be the most straightforward, explicit comedy I've seen this year. God bless it. Spurred on by a frantic, hard-working cast, and a fast-paced, joke-heavy script, this is a concise summation of life, no strings attached. The scope of the show forces it to be a deliberate and overbearing, but it's not long enough to be redundant, and too sweet to ever taste bitter.

The story begins, as it must, with A Guy being born. Sitting in the hospital (so we're told), in some weird cross between Family Guy and the classic baby skit from Free To Be Me and You, he instructs Another Guy (Corey Patrick, who in this case is the doctor, but will later on be the father and the son, the employer and the employee, and so forth) to return him to the womb. When told it's impossible, he curses, does a double-take, and wonders what that word means. Quips the doctor: "That's what your mom and dad did." A groan-worthy joke, yes, but the show charms with the relentlessly innocent jokes. (I would, however, pare back on the curses: they give the show a sophomoric feel that director Jacob Krueger has worked so hard to ameliorate.)

Krueger's work is fairly subtle for a work so flatly punctuated. The show begins with three chairs hanging from knobs on the wall made out to be stars, and as time progresses, those chairs are joined by the detritus of life. I'm a fan of economical design: every prop has significance, both in the scene, and then as a memory, fastened to the wall. When the show ends, as it must, with A Guy leaving the stage, there is a moment, before the lights dim, that we can still see him, spread out in the mementos across the stars.

Also of note are Zarah Kravitz and Sutton Crawford, the appropriately titled A Woman and Another Woman. The two are fine comic actresses, and they slip easily into and out of each role. Like the men, they're comfortable hamming up the physical comedy of breast-feeding or making-out (especially that first orgasm), but they're also quite capable of evoking sorrow, especially as A Guy's mind starts to go.

A Guy Adrift in the Universe may be a blunt instrument, but let's not forget for a moment that hammers are what nail points home. This production is a testament to the successful use of simplicity.