“Spacemen From Space!” August 12-22
(Written and Directed by Ian W. Hill)

The Brick Theater, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn
www.bricktheater.com

Queen of the Final Frontier: Moretto and Baker command the stage

I’ve long believed that only the true virtuoso knows all the wrong notes to hit. Though often harbored in the kitsch-tastic Brick Theater (on whose board he serves), Ian W. Hill’s mission is not so much one of guilty pleasure as exuberant discomfort. But he has a humane ear for what people respond to and an honesty about what he himself enjoys that make him the ideal mastermind for this revel in the most glaring transgressions and illuminating leaps of episodic pulp.

“Spacemen From Space!” is a repackaged live DVD of all six episodes of a 1930s movie serial that never existed, or couldn’t have ’til now — the story of a jet-packed adventurer and a radio cowboy singer who must race to foil a remote-control plot from the stars, it balletically trips over itself in the forward rush of media and tech it can scarcely absorb before advancing through.

Of course we citizens of the future know where all this is heading, but the ensemble-of-thousands in “Spacemen” just have to follow along with a vocabulary breathlessly outpacing understanding — “infra-sonic beam frequencies,” gravity-canceling harnesses and other proto-junk of the post-industrial pileup litter the dialogue, and the ingeniously dazed cast are dramatizing a whole century that wasn’t ready for its close-up encounter with A-bombs and NASA disasters.

Hill has an expert ear for phrasings which bypass sequential sense but surpass logic in spite of themselves — “an ancient Eastern principle as yet undiscovered by our modern empirical science” — and there are baroque line readings, missed cues and production shortcuts aplenty (like the multiple voiceovers, each a different tone or even variable vaudeville dialect, for one masked character), in a masterwork of informed carelessness and well-orchestrated mistakes.

But there is an admiration for the headlong assurance of antediluvian filmmakers and a wistfulness for their innocent unself-consciousness. In the uneasy alliance between Cowboy Adam (a heartbreakingly sincere Adam Swiderski) and Rocket Brannon (a sublimely smug James Isaac) we see the clickover from a majority-rural to a mostly-metropolitan America — the turning point at which central-casting country & western like Adam’s became unprecedentedly popular — and an advance echo of the coastal/heartland Two Americas of our own sourly bickering decade. Those associations — and the occasional anachronistic sci-fi tagline (“resistance is futile”) — fan out across the script like projection-booth tachyons traveling up and down the timeline of crap culture and woeful politics.

Cowboy Adam is the kind of stolidly principled leader you desperately want to believe in (not to name any names), and he and Brannon are fighting off an attack from a kind of unreal-America planet hidden on the opposite side of the sun, which is causing Earth’s weather to go haywire as the prelude to an invasion (if only global warming were really so simple). Meanwhile the aliens’ local competition, fiend-of-the-week The Lavender Spectre, wants to grab a secret mineral coincidentally buried beneath Adam’s ranch that can control all weather and keep him on top instead (going to war over natural resources — thank God it’s just a movie serial!).

Adam’s and Brannon’s various worshipful sidekicks, right-hand men and tough-talking love interests materialize our tragic trust in paragons, but the fever is not contained to one world; the attacking planet’s queen, Oneida (in a tour de force of seething Bankheadian hauteur from Cara Moretto), and her prime minister Lord Nugas (played in lethal deadpan and stealth pathos by Aaron Baker) turn out to be fans of the drifting radio-wave adventures of Cowboy Adam and Rocket Brannon, respectively, and sassy newshound Chickie West (Ali Skye Bennet, who deserves the extra hundred thrilling installments other characters keep alluding to) is only stowing away for the story — all the cosmos is a stage, and like the phantom “televisor” images of various machinating villains, all will be reduced to consumable broadcast ectoplasm in time.

There’s a killer-robot army rising up in revolt on the enemy planet to seal the deal of “Spacemen”’s parable of Bush-era misrule, but the human cast members emote to wheezing, honking extremes regularly, as if expressing the sheer volume and velocity of 20th century experience is overstretching the machinery of their mortal shells.

The entire ensemble rides out this grim fairytale of collapsing illusions acrobatically. Trav S.D., as a suspicious science genius, rocks a pencil moustache into a full old-master painting of caricature; Justin RG Holcomb as Adam’s explosive radio producer Chip Kaiser sets a new standard for back-row bombast (and his simple “Ah’ll see yew at BREHK-fast” is the new “Release the Kraken”); Yvonne Roen as an unscrupulous psychic doesn’t wait to channel Zsa-Zsa; and Douglas MacKrell as a zombified professor makes Edward Everett Horton giggle in his grave.

The finely-tuned antique patter; the embryonic feminism of fish-out-of-water like weird-science frontierswoman Dr. Sally (a combustible Amy Overman); the stereotypical Western-wear, period-chic city attire and Halloween-futurist alien finery of the play’s wardrobe closet; and the makeshift genius of the modified pots-and-pans prop-design are all double-edged spatulas of bygone-era mirth and in-context empathy.

Hill’s clever, tuneful cowboy songs comprise a hilarious unconscious commentary track; the characters’ homilies are wise beyond all intention (at one point Adam proclaims that “nothing’s impossible when it comes to love between two earthlings” — thanks for prying open that marriage definition, cowboy!); and the production may have written the epitaph for the whole Obama era when an alien, summing up his faction’s plans for democratic utopia, declares “we have already installed a suggestion box.”

It’s easier to look back and laugh than to smile at the present. But “Spacemen” reprocesses the storms of tyranny and deprivation that were gathering in the real-life 1930s as stories of triumphal uplift. And as Chip advises Adam at the end, the best thing he can do for his country right then is to sing another song. There’s no real magic mineral that can stop the rain. But spirits like Cowboy Adam, who put what’s right ahead of what’s real, are what made America great — or at least a great idea. And somehow, from the cliff’s edge of snark, “Spacemen From Space!” rescues the feeling that that power of belief is not just an artifact, but a basic element.

[http://collisionwork.livejournal.com/]

“That Old Soft Shoe,” June 6-27
(Written by Matthew Freeman, Directed by Kyle Ancowitz)

The Brick Theatre, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn
www.bricktheater.com

We been dumb so long it looks like smart to us — eight years of absurdity make the most mild gestures toward common sense seem like a new age of enlightenment. All the competence and sincerity have robbed us of the right to ridicule what’s still broke. But “That Old Soft Shoe” is fighting to restore our franchise to crack wise to power.

The play is set in a secret prison whose harsh-interrogation office-drones are getting worried as the timeclock ticks over from let’s-roll to hope ’n’ change. The dance routine of the title has a very specific, absurdist role in the action which I should leave for audiences’ eyes only, but metaphorically it matches the sitcom psychobabble the players speak in, a speech pattern permanently scrambled by the dense forest of official legalese and the verbal dance they have to do around what they can’t admit.

Their worst nightmare arrives in the person of an inspecting senator visiting on behalf of the proverbial new boss, masterfully pitched by actor Steve Burns somewhere between Groucho Marx in all those old movies where he’s called in to take over already-teetering universities and kingdoms and Tom Cruise in “Tropic Thunder.” A slogan-spouting, nod-and-winking nutcase, Senator Corpuscle is there to slap a kinder, gentler label on business-as-usual but his anarchic manner has us cheering for the ability to blurt out the obvious.

“Soft Shoe” is part of the Too Soon Festival, a month of theatre based on fresh wounds and jumped conclusions. It’s too soon to describe the moral moving target of the Obama years — an in-law of mine just got a shitload of student-loan debt relieved and a nephew’s going to college on the new G.I. Bill, and the entire architecture of executive power and provisional rights has been left intact and at the whim of how good or bad a chief we’ve got, and how ’bout those highway improvements!

There’s still a lot we don’t know — like what-all else exactly is in the healthcare bill, though the *other* back-roomful of people who came up with that one sure seemed satisfied. Behind the play’s many big and nervous laughs is the sneaking feeling that we’ve moved from a season of leaders who were sure they knew what’s best for us to a long stretch not of something that makes it all better, but of those who decide for us what’s good enough.

“Happily After Tonight,” June 9-24
“Jeannine’s Abortion,” June 24-27

The Brick Theatre, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn
www.bricktheater.com

Out-of-touch princesses and displaced elves are a standby of postmodern satire and metafiction. But it’s not that our fairytale and children’s-classic icons have fallen on hard times so much that we have — we’ll cheer the hero’s rise if we must, but we’d rather shout in triumph when the mightier are brought low. Celebrities’ descent and paragons’ debasement are the once-removed rollercoaster drops we wait for, signals of the superiority of our safety and the relief of our survival — the slasher franchises we enjoy are no more bloody than the unlicensed originals of Grimm’s fairytales (or the Bible’s).

So it’s not so much a natural progression as the natural state of popular stories to see Alice, Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and the Big Bad Wolf repossessed into a starlets-and-serial-killer tragic-farce, and Mateo Moreno’s bloody, trash-talking and hilarious “Happily After Tonight” mines timeless narrative gold and tells us the truth of what we’re watching for.

A sassily-precise and balletically violent small ensemble, highlighted by Moreno as writer-director-lead villain, Stephanie Wortel as a longsuffering paparazzi-shy Sleeping Beauty and Benjamin Gooch as a bar-crawling Prince Smarmy, play out the central tale of a broken-homed Red Riding Hood, an at-risk clubland runaway Alice and a mass-murdering misogynist Wolf that taps the dysfunctional-family phobias of Black Forest fables and backwoods gore-porn alike.

Sacrificial fantasies are our staged escape from the predators in our midst — it’s fashionable to note that story never dies, but all we ever wanted was to survive the people in the stories, from primal lore of lives lost along the hard slog of history to scandal-sheet and true-crime tabloid testaments of those who weren’t as lucky as we are who we’d like to think weren’t as smart.

When Red Riding Hood as avenging Woodsman-trained warrior chick squares off in a final murder-slapstick smackdown with the Wolf, she’s making light of our greatest fears and killing for our sins.

***********************

An asymmetric fugue of control and mania has been Hope Cartelli’s mission as an actor, and she well imparts peaks and valleys of frenzy and ennui across the landscape of “Jeannine’s Abortion”’s cast as director (from a script by Eric Bland).

The dramatis personae of post-young Brooklynites start off in run-on rough-draft autobiographies and monologues of impassioned trivia (Daniel Kublick’s early speech on mini cereal boxes ranks with Illeana Douglas’ penis-claw solo from “Search and Destroy” among the all-time great revealingly meaningless jags), and dips of contended desperation (like Jeff Lewonczyk’s depressive cocktail-party discourse, which has me using phrases like “post-young”).

The characters are calling to each other from different worlds — be it the wavering orbits of committed relationships, one friend’s flight to China or another’s impending abortion proceeding from one of the liaisons none of the others know she has — and Cartelli’s good ear and antic eye keep all the separate planets spinning well.

For knowing cosmopolitans (all but Jeannine — played by Siobhan Doherty — named after the actor in the role), everyone else is more than vaguely nervous abut the title event — but the real stillbirth at issue is the lives they think they’ve missed. Jeannine’s choice does seem to act as a pivot in those lives, with all the rest nudged into a decision that resets their fate — fractious Morgan and Emily confronting what drives them crazy about each other and realizing they prefer it; Daniel and Lindsay (Carter, in a performance of lifegiving, scattered intensity) choosing settled marriage (and some impulsive overseas charity work, but hey).

The only ones who don’t change much are Jeff, who leaves for parts unknown, keeping true to his solitude, and Jeannine, who closes the play with a soliloquy on the fairweather mind and the constant, self-determined body that relies mostly on iffy similes from literature and pop culture and leaves the character mostly hidden behind her concrete decisions. Many parts of her will remain unknown too, which are places no one has to go, since in the end, she is really all she needs. And that, like individual choice, is still not exactly a crime.

Warning: This post tells you everything that happens in the movie it reviews, and I wouldn’t want you to actually have to see it, so read on:

What is it with young couples being terrorized by demons and mutants? It’s like post-feminist Hollywood has only progressed as far as no longer showing every sexually-active starlet getting her Puritan comeuppance by werewolf or slasher, and instead visiting misery on attached twentysomethings, as if following some strange dysfunctional focus-group data on how the divorced majority of America wants to see monogamy portrayed.

Anyway, that’s the basic purpose of “Splice,” a kind of “Paramedic Activity” about two young scientists precipitously creating a new lifeform for an icky corporation, after which offend-the-gods gore-carnage ensues. I guess they named it “Splice” instead in the hopes that this piecea’ crap will at least get one of those obscure editing awards that scrolls across the screen at subliminal speed during eight seconds of the Oscars.

The genetically-engineered tyke becomes a surrogate, though secret, child figure to the transgressive junior eggheads, and the movie turns into some kind of strange horror-parable about 4 a.m. feedings (though, yes, in the flick’s tourette’s-like reference-check of every sci-fi suck-fest ever made, someone does actually shout “It’s Alive!” at one point).

The kid matures rapidly, thus crushing all hopes of finding some genetic cure for co-star Adrien Brody’s inability to age past 16. The girl can’t talk but can arrange Scrabble tiles like in those chimp-intelligence experiments where the apes learned to type; also like the chimps, the Foster-Kid of Frankenstein is capable of cognitive mischief, as when she spells out “N-E-R-D” to describe her surrogate mom.

Miming the desperation of the derivative and uninspired screenwriters, the mom-scientist sees the tiles upside-down and decides to name the kid “Dren,” which was Joanie’s nickname for Potsie Weber when she sent him secret crush-notes on “Happy Days,” the show that put “jump the shark” in our vocabulary to begin with.

The little freak matures into womanhood and seems to turn into Sinead, though the real model is poor, thankless Thandie Newton in the B-movie version of “Beloved”; never since then has a hapless unknown had so much nudity still show through such bad Halloween prostheses and been so egged on to sink her fangs into the scenery.

Dren’s got the cells of several species in her, which enables her to sting cats to death with her scorpion-tail, sprout goldfish-fins that she can for some reason fly with, etc.; Mrs. Scientist also put some of her own genes in there so Adrien gets attracted to the kid as his own wife gets more remote; there ensues a rapid succession of incest, mother-daughter torture-porn (a detour into “Bad Seed” mad-sploitation ’cuz the unstable woman scientist’s own mom had — eeek! — mental illness, eww), and rape, when Dren turns male (for no discernible reason but that someone watched the right five minutes of “Jurassic Park”) and ensures his/her/its survival by impregnating Mommy Einstein (just to put the “post” back in “post-feminist”).

I said “rapid” but it sure didn’t seem that way. I think even the editing award may not be a done deal. Suffice it to say it ain’t cool, dude. It Ain’t Cool at all.

[Trav S.D., “Tall Tales (and Counterfeit Codices)”, Dixon Place, NYC, 2/22/10]

He had me at “smithy,” one of several words so archaic there was no need for a free-associative filibuster of misspeech to turn them into automatic laugh lines. But Trav S.D. held me on every word like the medicine-show spellbinder he played in a brisk first set of flimflam from the front porch of an America so bygone even those who lived through it weren’t there.

Trav took us through tales of carnival freaks, two-fisted lawmen and the shellgame of the New York public school system, tripping on point over every term, conjugated into a multiverse of illuminating malapropism. Thinking spherically and snowballing sideshow nonsense with modern-day senselessness (in one memorable bit the traveling trickster tries to secure a grade-school artist’s residency for his flea-bitten trained monkeys and dog-biting men), Trav showed that the classic con-man is as undying an American type as the stuff we need escapism for.

Flailing his points home like a charismatic receiving divine bulletins or a prophet undergoing a series of lucid strokes, Trav channeled the likes of P.T. Barnum, who fleeced urban bumpkins in the fringe theatre of his time not far from where Trav was plying his trade.

Halfway in, he ditched some of the folksy drag for an adventure into the self-imagined sophistication of those same urban bumpkins, with a satire of spy-thriller literature that extended the genre’s over-exposition into intricate descriptions of its own arbitrary coincidences and ethical failings.

Some jokes you could see coming like the meteor you’re dying to watch whack the earth at a summer multiplex; most left you hysterically wondering at the license number of the truck that just hit you so you could get it to back up over you again. In these United States there’s always another one coming — but get on the road, because there sure ain’t a Trav S.D. born every minute.

[http://travsd.wordpress.com; www.dixonplace.org]

[Saturday Night Saloon series, 1/9/10, Brooklyn, USA]

Finales aren’t a plot point, they’re a genre. You can save a lot on comics and invest it in a lot of popcorn-counter runs if you just get the planetary-blowup last issues of comic companies’ crossover events and skip the scenes leading up to the big dance-competition throwdown in the average multiplex pageant. Hence, while the leadup episodes of Vampire Cowboys’ Saturday Night Saloon series of monthly episodic plays were each their own reward, every company knew what they were there for when it all came to an end.

Dustin Chinn’s “Let’s Ninja Science Ranger Team Get!”, which had proven four previous times that there’s no longer any limit once you’ve gone too far, concluded its tale of time-traveling martial-arts action figures by launching right into that dance-competition you craved, with bonus cross-millennial rap battle as the Rangers travel to the early-’70s Bronx in a final conflict for the past and future of hip hop that’s too complicated to go into and too immaterial to matter as the crew convert the real-life audience into their block-party grandstand and gleefully get buried under their own fallen fourth wall.

Brent Cox’s “Jack O’Hanrahan and the Troubulation of Doom” pushed the plunger on a matching self-referential implosion, as the play’s unseen narrator stops explaining and starts interrupting for some deus-ex-machina plot wrap-ups to complement onstage eminence Kelly Rae O’Donnell’s tour de force demonic-possession solo, an occult-madonna set piece that makes Mike Mignola’s comics seem not so unfilmable after all.

Payoffs can be emotional as well as pyrotechnic, so Mac Rogers’ “Mother Sacramento” and James Comtois’ “Entrenched” each pulled the surprise ending of authentic pathos, the latter with a depressingly redemptive scenario of eternal sacrifice by a time-manipulating scientist who will never know he’s a savior; the former with a downbeat private armageddon for the ecclesiastical melodrama’s faithless-cleric heroine and her fallen former-lover antagonist.

The jewel of this evening’s logical conclusions was Crystal Skillman’s cybotage potboiler “Hack,” an entire narrative cobbled from coming-attractions-style outbursts giving way to action-flick afterthought serial epilogues, all seen through the interface of Skillman’s masterful eye for archetypal cliché and suicide-mission self-invention. The dramatis personae of shadowy e-terrorists, teeth-gritting commando spooks, and those who play them on their Facebook page go through a gauntlet of real-time jump-cuts, faked fights, echoing gauzy flashbacks and other actually-absent production tricks that both make you aware of how helpless contemporary movie and TV performers are without their FX bells and whistles and how irreducible are the talents of this definitively game-faced ensemble.

Having thrown everyone clear of the blast at the end of each month’s bill, Jeff Lewonczyk’s “Lady Cryptozoologist: Season 2” settled for no less than crescendoing its cliffhanger about a madly propagating mutant fungus with a Lovecraftian quantum orgasm and climactic mountain cave-in. And then a singalong. Because nothing ever ends, and even if the world’s blown up and the theatre’s dead, the true artists are always up for renewal.

[www.vampirecowboys.com/events.htm]

The High Cost of Living
(A nod to Neil Gaiman, of course)

The intrinsic understanding the dream world had availed me of its physicality allowed not only the ground rushing up towards me to fill me with the fear of death, but also to put me at peace with the knowledge that I would not actually die. This was a dream after all, and I would only wake as I slammed into the canyon floor. (Freud was wrong.)

I opened my eyes. The dream had ended. It was dead. It was nothing more than a memory: a photograph on the back of my eyelids. Is this then what death is? Is death when something is left only as a memory? Is death when the thing can no longer speak for itself? The dream was gone, and I lived to tell the tale. Then what happened to the dream? Did Morpheus retake his creation to recycle it as someone else’s nighttime fantasy? Did it simply vanish? Or did it retreat to the Dreaming to live out the rest of eternity in indescribable peace? Not one person or thing can know. One person or thing can only guess.

By trade, writers are guessers. They pontificate wildly upon topics that erect a protective wall of mystery before the intrusive eyes of science and religion. It is all a guess. Some guesses are accepted by scientists, and some are accepted clergy, but it is still all a guess.

To Gray’s Anatomy, death is the ending of all vital functions or processes in an organism or cell. To the Bible, death is the final state of the unsaved, and “…he who keeps My word shall never see it.” To the scientists, Gray’s Anatomy is indisputably correct. To the Christians, the science is incomplete. Neither views are wrong. Science cannot disprove faith, nor can faith disprove science. Writers accept this fact, thrive off of it, and then make names for themselves with it.

To young Raymond Douglas Bradbury, “Death is your little sister one morning when you look into her crib and see her staring at you with blank, blue eyes… When you stand by her high chair four weeks later and realize she’ll never be in it again to make you jealous of her because she was born…”

To Neil Gaiman’s character, Robert Gadling, “Death is rubbish… The only reason people die is because everyone does it. You all just go along with it.”

Abbe Faria, Dumas’ heroic mentor to the Count of Monte Cristo, views death as “…sole consolation of my wretched existence… God grants that there no longer exists for me distance or obstacle.”

Then what defines death? Each writing exposes a different view on the subject. Each writing is just as arguably correct as the next because each writing draws expertise from the same vast uncertainty. Upon reflection, we come to the conclusion that death is logically indefinable but by one overlooked trait: nothing may die without first living. Death is the price paid for life. Whether it is a cell phone, chivalry, or a person that has died, it is innately understood in any philosophy, that these things were once alive. Death, in all its incarnations, is the high cost of living.

“Craven Monkey and the Mountain of Fury”
The Brick Theatre, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn, 12/17/09

www.pipermckenzie.com

True to the action ethos of its kung-fu title, you’re dropped right in the middle of a staged fight and a laugh riot, its wordless cast projecting a polyglot of stage-hypnotist zoo-mime, Keystone Cop drills, interpretive jazzhands, Shaolin playbook and Vedic sex manual. But let’s back this up and tell the players apart:

After gathering several years of evidence on writer-director Jeff Lewonczyk’s unerring inappropriateness and actor-director Hope Cartelli’s method-seizures, when the two took joint credit for “Craven Monkey”’s concept I parked in the front row and girded my lap for an oversloshing keg of crazy. But the clashing elements of their creativity seem to moderate each other (and what better definition of marriage can I come up with?), achieving an equilibrium that eludes most of the characters in this Darwinian fable.

A dawn-of-time quest myth from before the continents drifted apart and any of the world’s folkloric traditions got unmashed, “Craven” concerns the first hominid to be ostracized from the tribe, thus entering the necessary ordeal to ascend to singular humanity.

Existing on the fringes of acceptable culture and having explored the pre-Biblical disaster story of the king of gods calling down a global flood to silence the racket of human rutting in 2008’s “Babylon Babylon, scriptwriter Lewonczyk has a keen sense of history pivoting on the primal faux pas, and the titular Craven Monkey’s transgression entails offending the tribe’s sense of tradition by doing it biped-style. A dirty joke slips into poetry, as Craven Monkey and Lady Monkey become “the first to look into each other’s eyes and see themselves reflected.”

Nonetheless, Craven is ejected onto a Scapegoat’s Journey that at first mainly involves a plan to scale the tallest nearby mountain and drop its teetering boulder on his hated hometown. But a more meaningful ascension becomes his destiny, shoved along by two prehistoric parent figures in a kind of archaeological out-of-town tryout of the God, Lucifer and Job story.

Cartelli (”The Vital Spirit”) is a bioengineer earth mother fashioning a worldwide menagerie of children species, setting boundaries of extinction when they don’t know what’s good for them and holding a few limited-edition behemoths in reserve to send natural-order transgressors like Craven Monkey to a permanent time-out — leave it to this show’s brain-trust to give evolution a creation myth and come up with a scientific rationale for mythic monsters (though the pre-Abrahamic pantheons Lewonczyk and Cartelli draw on did nature’s work with a much more modern grasp of basic biology than the guys who took over from them). Art Wallace (”The Sensei”) is a celestial game-warden the Spirit conjured in her image to manage creation but who becomes a Prometheus-like troublemaker, coaching Craven Monkey to walk upright, use weapons, and defy the goddess.

Left behind with the tribe who won’t try anything once, Lady Monkey runs away to rejoin her lover and they become an earthy Adam and Eve struggling to escape the garden, with the Spirit and Sensei two poles of commanding common sense and nurturing aspiration that no one can think are either fully right or wrong.

But remember, when it comes to most of the dramatis personae, they ain’t heavy — they’re monkeys! The only member of the company who gets to speak let alone lecture is Lewonczyk as the offstage narrator, delivering the profane text in deadpan nature-documentary locutions that disclaim weightiness while the nonverbal cast stomps home a timeless semaphore of love, striving, and projectile poop.

Cartelli mimes an imperious, reality-weaving dance of destruction and creation decked in a good-fairy armor that calls to mind some holiday department-store window diorama of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”; Wallace radiates all-fatherly warmth with serene arm-sweeps and a shaggy conical cloak that suggests a cross between a walking fir-tree and Silent Bob.

Adrian Jevicki and Jessi Gotta as the two lead Monkeys and the ensemble of Becky Byers, Fred Backus, Mateo Moreno and Melissa Roth as the tribe and various monsters are a whirlwind of learned frenzy, igniting the stage to a story told mostly in fight-choreographers Qui Nguyen and Adam Swiderski’s Jack Kirbyesque ballets of brutality.

That team, best known for the Vampire Cowboys troupe’s stage-combat-centered high kitsch, stretches some unaccustomed but expert muscles of delicate harmony as well as acrobatic carnage here. Craven and Lady’s most crucial heroism comes as lovers, not fighters, when a blockbuster cataclysm leaves them alone and obliged to get down to the business of repopulating the earth, this time with the new human species. We all know how that worked out, but the play ends before the, erm, honeymoon is over.

This is all part of the self-explanatory Fight Fest, a season of sports entertainment to mirror our coast-to-coast shouting match and international pastime of perpetual battle. But in the elegant interplay and affirmative physicality of “Craven Monkey”’s considered slapstick is a vision of passionate impulse bestowed with purpose, and essential conflict tamed as art.