Review of the SF Fringe Festival performance of SF Bufoons
in Bay Area Reporter
CLICK HERE FOR RECENT REVIEWS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER CLICK ON PLAY FOR AUDIENCE REVIEWS FOR THAT PLAY
- 21/One: Twenty-One Shows in One Hour
3 Plays About Your Mom
Antarctica
ARE YA WORKING?
Being Something: Living "Young" and Growing "Old" in Oakland
Bound and Gagged
Brilliant Disguise
Brother #1
Cervix With A Smile
Chinese Clown Cabaret
CornTato
Divided We Fall
Do The Clam
El Camino Loco- Fear of a Brown Planet
Fresh Meat
Go Kibbitz
go!
Got Lucky
Green Bamboo Hermitage
Here to There
LOUNGE-ZILLA!
Love Scenes- Magnificence of the Disaster
MEDIAVOID
Name You Can Trust, A
nEO-sURREALISTS
Paper Dolls
Playing in the Dark- Politics on the Edge
Revolving Madness
SHIFTINGS
Show me where it hurts- Slow Moves, Rich Tales
Sperm Warfare
Thersites
Waiting for the Relevance
WALKING BACK TO BROOKLYN
Werewolf, The
When You Stand Alone
Yellow Tunic, The
You May Now Kiss.... My Sass
The SF Buffoons are boffo. Go see them to revel and squirm in the fetid, trashed world of a gang of latter-day hobos commenting on the state of modern "society" with its Abu Ghraibs, Katrinas, Homeland Security bozos, and the seeming senselessness of it all.
The place to catch these swells is at The San Francisco Fringe Festival, now well underway mostly at the quaint EXIT Theatre spaces in the lovely Tenderloin, but also South of Market at Jon Sims Center for the Arts, site for "Divided We Fall," A Buffoon Show. The SF Buffoons are a group of local "Internationally Unknown and Locally Scorned Performance Artists" who will take you to the depths of perdition in their grungy post-apocalyptic existence. Their characters are filthy, rough-hewn, drunken, stoned, cracked out, crude, rude, lewd, but most of all hilarious. They are not unlike such Depression Era comic-strip/Vaudeville characters as Krazy Kat, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, and that famed hobo,Weary Willie, but entirely uncensored. These kats totally revel in their squalor. They accept their slimy fate as creatures of the gutter. They pantomime pissing on the American flag and pooping for amusement, pushing their lowness to the limits, in the process sharply commenting on America's laughable immorality.
The principal persona is The Idiot/Papa, performed with just the right mix of sober observation cut with deranged babble by the solid Eric Wilcox, who serves as the brains of the group, though his sanity is entirely questionable. Wilcox is the axle around which the other characters revolve like broken spokes. He's the glue in their hair. He's got the demeanor of a Cicero orating, but he can't help fouling his speaker's nest with expletives and crude lust. Meanwhile the stereotypical fat, smelly, drunken Mexican, "El Boracho," played to comic perfection by Noe Zavala, carouses happily in drunken lasciviousness with the loose, prank-playing, foul-mouthed Maria, wonderfully rendered by Zuzka Sabata who flaunts her anus and flops all over the stage, sprawling out in nymphomaniac abandon. The "dumb" character, who utters only chirps and squeals, but serves as the group's conscience, is "Chickenwing," played by Mars Wind, one hand loosely bound to his side, his huge, burrito-sized member concealed within an enormous lumpy diaper. He's everybody's foil. They screw with him as they please, guffawing all the while. Most compelling of all the characters is "Monkeyboy," played with astonishing crass wickedness and gangly body language by Michael Riddle, whose big mouse ears offset his long, narrow face with its fabulous wicked expressiveness, with those wild eyes of his, and that big devious, unforgettable grin.
Not for a moment do you doubt these folks are living a base life, slimed and bloodied and abandoned by society. They grovel and amuse themselves as the ugliest of Americans, and in their reflection we can't help but see ourselves. Life ain't all roses. In fact, it smells like shit . . . but then, some people like it that way, and that's the ineffable truth the Buffoons have seized on with zeal.