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.

RUS(H)

Never before have I seen a play that manages so well to walk the jagged line between passion and violence. Why then must RUS(H) spend so much time drifting, not walking, sluggishly floating complex philosophical thoughts about sexuality and the soul's unclenched needs? At times, James Scruggs achieves a beauteous balance between his text and image, as when Rus (Luis Vega) recalls, in a flash of video screens puppeted around him, how he hit Sonny (Lathrop Walker) with a car. At others, disconnected images of jail corridors, shadowy figures, and oversized tape machines lend a pretentious air of gravitas to words that, on their own, would be more than enough. As the characters often ask, "I'm not bad. Aren't I enough?" I'm sure the script would ask the same of its creator if it weren't so often overwhelmed by the video.

Luckily, Scruggs and director Kristin Marting have given some legs to all the heady thoughts floating around out there: the play pulses to a Latin beat and the silent tangos reveal more about the dissolving relationship between Rus and his wife, Sireene (chandra thomas), than their lies do. And on the other side of Anabella Lenzu's choreography is Qui Nguyen, doing his darkest, most grown-up fight choreography. He brings a modern gladiator aesthetic to the simmering homo-erotic tension between Sonny -- whose overexposure to Tina (crystal meth) has dimmed his ability to feel pleasure (the dramaturg calls him an anhedonist) -- and Rus, who is so haunted by what seems to him as routine that he longs for uncharted territories. Additionally, many of the images take on lives of their own: four LCD screens are manipulated by 'video puppeteers' (Marc Bovino, Dax Valdes) who fragment, overlap, and meld their screens around or to the actor's bodies.

Even still, the play seems strangled by its own conventions: the strongest moments either relegate the images to a simple screen-saver background of over-magnified leaves, or abandon the shtick altogether, as when Mr. Walker -- by far the creepiest and most compelling part of RUS(H), with his empty eyes and menacing glare -- pleads with the audience to share some Tina, drawing uncomfortably (or too comfortably) near. (It's a poor -- and awkward -- choice when Mrs. thomas directly addresses us later.) These are moments of pure chemistry; some of the others, as Rus forlornly reflects, are chemical: pure artifice.

RUS(H) is perhaps too daring, then, for its own good: it overdoses on technology. But the side-effects are dark and captivating, and though the show isn't quite a rush, it's one hell of a bender.

PLAY: "Men of Steel"

"You'll never get rid of us, we're like a bad smell that won't go away. And that smell, Menace, that smell is America!" Ah, cheesy lines like that remind me of what made me fall in love with comics in the first place. Over the years, the stories have gotten darker, and the narratives more interesting, but it all comes down to betrayal and courage, iced over with a healthy gloss of bad puns and even worse quips. Qui Nguyen knows what makes the comic-book world tick: his new play, Men of Steel, is both homage and parody at the same time, and it's a wonderful romp. Atop the surprisingly effective writing, his production company (Vampire Cowboy Theatre) is good with fight choreography, so there's over-the-top action to go with the over-the-top acting.

All in all, it's a fun night of theater: the first act introduces the fall from grace of three different heroes, split up into chapters and paced like the television show Heroes, and the second act unites them all in one final battle for redemption. There's betrayal, there's excitement -- there's even a bit of noir in "Chapter One: Maelstrom," a tragedy amid all the laughs in "Chapter Three: The Tragic Story of Bryant," and a stop-motion-animated showdown using Lego characters and some of the most hysterical voice-overs outside of Adult Swim.

Robert Ross Parker does an excellent job with the direction of this show, using video montages to cover up the set changes, and stagecraft to cut from moment to moment within each piece. Chapter One has Maelstrom literally pivoting from one encounter into his role as narrator, (a fast-paced way to introduce a saga), and Chapter Three reduces the action to a small neon-lit box. Some scenes overlap on stage, others remind us of the lingering evil off in the corner: it raises the stakes beyond the singular panel and onto the entire page. Chapter Two is the slow point of Men of Steel, but that has to do as much with the writing and acting as anything else: it is monotonous and loud, and hurls past with little to do but laugh at the Lucha Libre costumes of two wannabes. It's okay: there are enough jokes to keep the pace up, and because of the triple-casting of most characters, Paco Tolson is able to shine as The Mole, and Noshir Dalal as Daddy, rather than getting locked into their mediocre performances there as Damon and Lukas.

Give in to your superhero complex and check out Men of Steel; it has a few weaknesses (like any true hero) here and there, but on the whole, it's a mighty fine new play. Is Maelstrom (in Batman mode) a hero, or just a crazed vigilante? Is Captain Justice a murdering supervillain or a man with superpowers? Find out right now in this week's performances of Men of Steel!

[First posted to New Theater Corps, 3/18]