Fight Girl Battle World

Photo/Jim Baldassare

If you open your play with a series of outtakes between an action-figure Boba Fett and his tonton buddy, you've either got huge balls or you know exactly who your audience is. Vampire Cowboys Theater, the undisputed king of the action parody genre, has huge balls and they know their audience, returning to the same ground they covered in last year's Men of Steel, only this time, with a science-fiction spin: Fight Girl Battle World. They've got the vocabulary ("kilofraks," "durk," and "qward," for starters) and the hot guns and hotter girls to prove it. They've got a soundtrack that would make Quentin Tarantino proud: chase scenes set, tongue-in-cheek, to the Bob Dylan's "Handy Dandy," infiltration scenes accompanied by Beastie Boys' "Intergalactic," a hyperspace riff on 2Pac's "California Love," not to mention a climactic fight set to Evanescence's "Bring Me to Life." Beneath it all, Qui Nguyen's even got a passively subversive riff on the creation myth, as the last woman alive, E-V (Melissa Paladino), is sent on a quest by General Dan'h (Temar Underwood) to "bump uglies" with the last man alive, Adon-Ra (Noshir Dalal), a quest that pits them against the villainous President Ya-Wi (Jon Hoche).

Not that you'll have to read into anything in Fight Girl Battle World: the bad guys have sinister laughs (Elena Chang's Mikah Monoch), horrible accents (Andrea Marie Smith's Commander G'Bril), and ridiculous facial hair (Kelley Rae O'Donnell's Zookeeper); meanwhile, the good guys are filled with sarcastic quips (Paco Tolson's LC-4, a k a, the most endearingly arrogant robot since Marvin the Paranoid Android) and roughish charm (Maureen Sebastian's J'an Jah, not just a pilot, but the male of her species). Exposition is straight-up laughed at (after breaking in to kill the president, Adon-Ra explains: "I could go into the long explanation, but it'd be merely expository"), and Robert Ross Parker's direction seamlessly jumps from scene to scene, with actors suddenly dropping out of sight as others pop up into view, like a revolving reel on an old toy viewfinder.

You won't have to think about much, either: the dialog is filled with geeked-out in-jokes for both sci-fi and theater buffs ("Z-Class starfighters" and the diss "Wanna phone home?" go right up there with a play LC-4 wrote called "Death of a Space-Man"), and whether you get them or not, you'll laugh just from the pure energy and charm of the whole cast. Even the slowest bits of the play -- like a reminder from some sort of Smokey the Ursa Minor that "only you can prevent humanity" -- have a purpose, like letting you (and the actors) catch their breath right before another fight scene.

Oh, yes. There are fight scenes. Qui Nguyen doubles as the choreographer, and he take the opportunity to try out a lot of techniques I've never seen before. In an early clip of a "grainy video", the shifting positions of a flashlight behind a scrim cast amplified silhouettes that jitter against the screen, playing with depth perception and height. In another, Nguyen uses body doubles to allow him to play with perspective, a cinematic move that helps him nail the instant replay. And, c'mon: the dude also turns a puppet spacefight into a martial arts showdown: "What in the qward was that?" asks Dan'h, as three actors fly hand-guided ships at one another. "I think they just bit us." Granted, there have been smoother fight scenes on stage before (like in The Jaded Assassin), but they've never been so funny. (And kudos to the actors without professional training: that makes their physical control even more impressive.)

Given the current trend of film adaptations (Spider-Man, Batman, and The Addams Family musicals), it's only a matter of time before Broadway taps someone for Star Wars: The Musical. Hopefully they'll ask Qui Nguyen and Robert Ross Parker for some advice, because they've done a really durking good job.

PLAY: "The Children of Vonderly"

Photo/Matt Zugale

The Children of Vonderly is a delightfully full new play from Lloyd Suh that is, more than anything else, playful. Keeping in tone with the upbeat eccentrics of the Vonderly household, Suh redefines normality in every inch of his script, from "anti-semantic" jokes to quirky dismissals of religion and sassy wordplay ("a motherfucker's fucking mother"). Even the few moments that are more repetitious than paralleled are enjoyable: closer to sports replay than sitcom rehash.

The play opens on the seventh and last day of Shiva, the Jewish period of mourning (in this case for the Vonderly's adopting father), a period that has only "amplified the weird." Jerry (William Jackson Harper) carts himself around in a wheelchair and yarmulke, trying to take care of his sweet but mentally-stunted sister, Sasha (Jackie Chung) and his shy, mountainous brother, Abraham (Shawn Randall). Unfortunately for him, it's his grief-stricken mother, Norma (Lynn Cohen), whom he ought to worry for, and after her prolonged, opera-worthy histrionics ("You stupid ingrates, I love you"), another of his adopted brothers, Benjamin (Stephen Jutras), decides to have her committed. Jerry's world, already fragile enough thanks to the glass house set design by Sarah Lambert, grows even shakier when his other siblings, bumbling Noah and weak-boned Georgia (Hoon Lee and Maureen Sebastian), announce their plans to elope. But wait, there's more: as Jerry loses himself in drink, mourning his own realized dreams for traveling with Georgia, Benjamin asserts himself again, hiring a supervisor, Chuck (Paco Tolson), to watch over the house.

For all that plot, the play runs remarkably smooth, and without any degeneration into farce. Instead, it's a comic drama that comes closer to identifying what truly makes a family than most plays I've seen this year. Credit where due to director Ralph B. Pena, who gracefully livens the interludes with breezy music and short, silent essences of scenes in the background (a picnic, a basketball game). The show is also grounded in the phenomenal casting, which keeps the characters from sliding into caricature or stereotype. They're funny, but they're not being handled with kid gloves, and their emotions (the chest-thumping "I love you") are pure.

The Children of Vonderly covers a lot of ground, and everyone involved in this outstanding production keeps up the pace. Ms. Cohen, in her few scenes, manages to be domineering, fragile, and then sweet; Mr. Lee swings from passionate to lost to weepy and back again; and Mr. Harper, stuck playing the stubbornest of the bunch, still manages to make his repetitious arguments sound new, as if he were a Rumpelstiltskin of words, spinning them into gold.

I Can't Believe It's Not Butter might want to tie an ad campaign in with this Ma-Yi production: for a show more than two hours long, it's remarkably spry and effortlessly involved. Not for lack of a better word, but because it's the right word: The Children of Vonderly is fun.