The Karma Initiative
1812 Productions' The Karma Cookie
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One measure of a play is how little we think about the writing: If we're noticing the playwright, rather than the characters, something's usually off.
Much feels off in P. Seth Bauer's The Karma Cookie, a world première by 1812 Productions, even while it's frequently funny. Brothers Barry (Anthony Lawton) and Alistair (Jered McLenigan) — British for no discernible reason — decide to let fortune cookie messages guide their journey. Where are these scruffy clowns going? To find out why the chicken crossed the road.
Then they're off down the road themselves, visiting Westminster Abbey, navigating a paddleboat, praying with Buddha, flying a kite, taking a train, singing a song, making us sing along — more reacting than taking action. Though they look adult, with McLenigan's Mohawk offering a reverse image of Lawton's thinning hair, they're barely children, hardly characters, just frenetic performers in platitude-inspired skits.
Sometimes they stumble, Monty Python-like, upon possible meaning, such as realizing that a gym's sign "Workout will make you free" echoes a Nazi concentration camp motto, leading to speculation about what's a regular sign and what's a "sign-sign." Hmmm.
Then they're off again, careening across Matt Saunders' black-box set like hyper children's theater characters, as when they realize that the grass is greener on the other side — and that there's always another side.
The boys shed light on neat little thoughts like this, but their eventual enlightenment feels like an old joke's dim punch line. The puppet-master playwright clearly wants them to be Waiting for Godot's Didi and Gogo or Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but brief allusions to an absent father who was nice to Alistair but not Barry don't add existential depth.
Lawton and McLenigan are energetic and charming, much like clever director Pete Pryor, but because this is more vaudeville than theater; we never care for them, and the conclusions they reach (about turning corners, about chickens and eggs) have as much impact as a fortune cookie or the Who tunes underscoring their supposedly Important Realizations.
The Karma Cookie | Through March 29, $25-$35, 1812 Productions at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-592-9560, 1812productions.org
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You touched on it briefly -- the biggest issue is how DUMB these two characters are. They are BARELY children and it is unbelievably off-putting. The script is a horrendous jumble of uninteresting events, but couldn't the direction have forced them at least slightly toward intelligence? Extremely frustrating. I don't know how existential discovery can be a goal when the parties involved can barely READ, let alone make sense of what's happening! That's not a reflection of your audience, it's an insult to them!
The sad thing is, this is such a promising idea. The abstract for the play is extremely appealing -- two guys guided by fortune cookies? The comic opportunities of that premise are endless. How this missed the mark so completely is a mystery.
Continued props to 1812 for producing and challenging us with new work -- of course they all can't be home runs. But I don't know how someone read this script and decided this was an appropriate production for a major city theatre company. That said, we are really looking forward to Let's Pretend We're Married.