"The Extraordinary Terms of Ordinary Life" by Four Humors Theater at the Loring Theater

The Extraordinary Terms of Ordinary Life is a wacky, off-beat comedy, which seems fairly typical of Four Humors Theater.  The other Four Humors show I've seen is the new original rock musical The Age of Wordsworth - the life and words of William Wordsworth set to rock music.  This show really is nothing like that, but they are similar in that both are pieces created from unique and original ideas that really evoke a sense of time and place.

The time and place of The Extraordinary Terms of Ordinary Life is a life insurance company in Manhattan in 1929, just before the crash.  The play was written by Ryan Lear (who also directs), inspired by some old life insurance training manuals he found at a garage sale.  A band playing jazz standards of the time helps set the mood, and the Loring Theater is a perfect venue - it's an old vaudeville theater built in the 1920s.  The set pieces are cartoonish skyscrapers, with a nifty backdrop of the skyline of NYC.  The whole thing put together almost feels like watching a silent film from the era, with exaggerated facial expressions and gestures and broad physical comedy.

John Davidson (the adorable Andy Rocco Kraft who's adept at the physical comedy) moves from a small town to the big city in response to an ad from the "Good Old Life Insurance Company."  Naive and enthusiastic, he believes he could be "the man."  He's immediately hired by the head of the company (Alisa Mattson, who also plays his wife, who it turns out is really the one in charge).  The experienced salesman Frank Engles (the fast talking Ryan Nelson) takes Johnny under his wing and teaches him how to sell to anyone.  Johnny soon becomes a big success, and falls in love with the sweet girl in Accounts Receivable, Mary Southworth (Rachel Petri), who has dreams of becoming a salesman like her father.  Rounding out the cast are Kat Wodtke as a creepy old man who eats paper, and the clowns Garret Vollmer, Mark Rehani, and Jon Mac Cole playing multiple roles (and harmonizing on the company theme song).

The Extraordinary Terms of Ordinary Life is a wacky, fun, at times inexplicable look at a time when the economy was booming, until it all fell apart.  Sound familiar?  Only in this world we learn that the reason the economy tanks is because the bankers are storing up gold to feed to angry demons to keep them from eating the entire human race.  Huh?  Oh well, it's about as good of a reason as any others I've heard!

Things aren't always what they seem.

"The 7-Shot Symphony" by Live Action Set at Loring Theater

I first heard of Live Action Set at the Ivey Awards last year when they performed the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in nine minutes (scroll to the bottom of this post to watch the video).  It was hilarious and brilliant, and I've had it in the back of my mind to check them out ever since.  So when I received an email from Artistic Director Noah Bremer telling me about their new show The 7-Shot Symphony, I decided it was a good time to finally check them out.  Live Action Set performs what they call "physical theater."  They don't have much in the way of props or set pieces; they act out everything with their bodies, from guns to trees to canyons to swinging saloon doors.  It almost reminded me of old silent films, except that there was of course sound (provided by the actors and members of local band Tree Party).  A note in the playbill says, "The creativity of non-literal depiction is what awakens the imagination.  And, this is what our theater does best - awaken the imagination."  They definitely succeeded in that with this piece!

The 7-Shot Symphony, an original piece written by Matt Spring and Ryan Underbakke (who also directs), is a re-imagining of several classic myths as a Western.  It's performed in seven "movements," like a piece of music, and each part tells a different story.  From the Epic of Gilgamesh (which was also the subject of a play I saw last fall called The Oldest Story in the World), to the Norse god Odin, to the Greek myth about Orpheus and Eurydice (which I was vaguely familiar with through Anias Mitchell's folk opera Hadestown), they all fit together in the end to complete the puzzle that is Deus county.  The seven actors take turns narrating the movements and playing the different parts, often changing characters in a matter of seconds with only a hat or a skirt or an accent or the carriage of their body to aid in the transformation.  It's really amazing how they create such specific characters; for the first half of the show I didn't realize that the actor playing Hades (Matt Riggs) was the same actor playing a few other roles, and it wasn't just the coat and top hat, it was the whole physicality of the character.  And that's just one example of the magic they create.

My favorite story was Orpheus and Eurydice.  In this incarnation, Orpheus is a frontiersman who borrows money from the evil Hades, owner of the Underworld saloon, to bring Eurydice to America from the "Old Country" to be his wife (similar to the plot of one of my favorite Minnesota-made movies, Sweet Land).  Eurydice can speak no English, so Orpheus (Joey Ford, a member of the band Tree Party) wins her heart by singing to her with the saddest and most beautiful yodeling I've ever heard.  It's a yodel that will break your heart.  Hades kidnaps Eurydice as payment on the loan, so Orpheus travels across the desert to find her.  When the lovers are reunited, Orpheus sings his song for her, and Jenna Wyse (also a member of Tree Party) as Eurydice adds her lovely voice to his.  It's a moment so beautiful that even evil Hades is moved.  He lets her go, but with a condition that tragically is not met.

There's not a weak link in this ensemble, which also includes Mark Benzel, Damian Johnson, Emily King, and Dustin Suggs.  They work and play together very well, and are all experts at creating not just characters but the whole environment in which the story takes place.  The Tree Party band provided a really cool country/rockabilly sound that makes me want to hear more from them.

I've seen several new (to me) theater companies in the last few weeks, and have been impressed with all of them.  The more theater I see, the more blown away I am by the talent in this town.  It's a beautiful thing.

And now, if you're a LOTR fan like me, enjoy this interpretation of the epic tale: