Kitsch (or, Two for the Price of One)
Theater for the New City, NYC
November 12-29, 2009 [www.theaterforthenewcity.net]

When last I saw playwright/songwriter/performer/best-boy-or-something Trav S.D. light up a stage he was putting the torch to establishment self-assurance and counterculture self-importance in the hit Charlie Manson musical Willy Nilly. In this Year of the Anniversary he only had to wait a few months to shift from the Tate/LaBianca murders to the toppling of the Berlin Wall.

But where Willy Nilly stuck a fork and several knives into the pedigree of feel-groovy trendsploitation revues from Hair to Rent, Kitsch reaches back to Trav’s oldest love, vaudeville, for a tapestry of lost threads.

It’s the night of communism’s collapse, with four sets of twins, distributed evenly in East and West in a Nazi social experiment gone wrong, setting out on a collision course of mistaken-identity slapstick. With the Stasi-wannabe set of brothers looking more like they walked through the last closet of Nazi costumes in central casting and a weird Weimar assortment of clowns on the Western side (where the capitalist set of brothers all run and staff a bar), we’re clued in early on the play’s unilateral surrender of historical relevance.

This could be any interchangeable kingdom in a Marx Brothers vehicle, however outwardly loaded the period and locale; the story is loosely taken from Shakespeare, who took it from Plautus, who took a lot from Menander et al. — all of which I took from the program notes — and the received nature of momentous events, the more remote the bigger they are, especially when packaged rather than pondered, is this production’s cruel and well-timed punchline.

You’re so primed to listen for the snark that it’s easy to overlook how tuneful a composer and nimble a lyricist Trav is, but the songs provide welcoming oases in the troupers’ long march of shtick, especially from Kate Valentine as a fatalistic prostitute-bard.

Trav himself plays the bar owner and the Eastern, erm, big brother (leading an oblivious last reconnaissance mission into the opened-anyway West), and is as always a force of unnaturalism, projecting with supreme authority while glancing nervously, like a ventriloquist without the deniability of a dummy, checking sideling for the angry horde he may at any moment incite.

Esther Silberstein, as a drag-king saloon chanteuse, delivers mournful interludes that stop the show literally, having little to do with the plot. She, like most of her cohort, has wandered in from some other story; her state-of-the-antique Brechtian numbers, like East and West, can’t really quite meet up, and before the rousing and knowingly forced happy finale, she’s sung the last words on an immortal passion and an unrequiteable love.

[http://travsd.wordpress.com]