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
Play: Divided We Fall
Reviewer: Obediah McGuffin
5 Stars
Unique and wonderful. The program’s description is totally true.
This is a classic, a presentation that should overtake "Beach Blanket
Babylon" as the Only-in-San-Francisco, must see theater. It imparts
refinement to the word "raw", and you have not seen its like unless
you were born in another country in another century.
Play: Divided We Fall
Reviewer: Cynthia
OMG - I've fallen in love with a Monkey Boy...
Play: Dived We Fall
Reviewer: Bob Hayden
5 Stars
This is THEATRE. Its the best show I've seen at the Fringe, the type of
work most audiences could never hope to see anymore. Energy, humor, derision,
and the music's good too. I would also give the program and the postcard
my nod as outstanding. You don't get a kick out of this . . . get a life,
or quit your job in the White House.
Play: Divided We Fall, a buffoon show
Reviewer: Mark Mardon, Bay Area Reporter
Meet the Buffoons
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 o!
n 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-size!
d 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.
Play: Divided We Fall
Reviewer: adam
1 Star
When shows like this get 5-star reviews, it makes me suspect the credibility
of this forum.
Could all these reviewers be right, and I and my boyfriend be wrong? Maybe
they were having an off night, but it was excruciatingly tedious for us
and for the (non-responsive) audience. That the Buffoons do have talent
and do work so hard (too hard) at being "purposely offensively stupid"
makes it even more painful. Stupid, yes. Offensive, only in that it was
so boring.
Play: Divided We Fall
Reviewer: Theatre Hater
5 Stars
Brilliant theater. The show progresses like a controlled burn that at turns
flares out of control, threatening to take cast and audience alike with
it, and moments later is smothered just long enough for breath to be caught
for the next flare up. Offensive, shameless, bleak, poetic. I don't want
to live in the world that the Buffoons portray, but their mirror is hard
to avoid - a fact which is by turns horrifying and exhilarating. Monkeyboy
and Pappa's relationship is by turns almost disarmingly charming and then
simply nauseating, El Boracho is both frightening and suprisingly sympathetic
(which again turns to nausea, particularly during his "flashback sequence"
- perhaps the most disturbing part of the show for some,) Maria is both
brilliantly childlike and deeply, offensively STUPID to the point of insanity,
and Chicken Wing is by turns depressing in his apparent sincerity and enraging
in his incompetence. Don't miss this show. I'm going to see it again....
Play: Divided We Fall
Reviewer: Jamie Daniel
5 Stars
Wow. Should I list a string of adjectives to try to express my awe or should
I just simply tell you how I was moved? Does seeing this show three times
in one week make me a groupie? Were my senses attacked? Were my perceptions
challenged? Was my being violated? Yes, no, yes, no, I don't know? Was it
better than "Wicked"? All I know is I'd gladly pay nine bucks
to see it again, and again, and again and again.
Play: divided we fall
Reviewer: mike
5 Stars
very fucked up, laugh out loud, who are these assholes? Some parts made
me very uncomfortable while others had me pissing my pants with laughter!
its worth the trip to jon sims.
Play: Divided We Fall
Reviewer: Cristopher Moore
DIVIDED WE FALL by the SF BUFFOONS
at 2003 New York City International Fringe
reviewed by Cris Moore
Divided We Fall by the SF Buffoons is a rare effort which invests an
old theatrical tradition with rich new blood, and the uncompromising result
is unsettling and rewarding at the same time. With a style that evokes elements
of Samuel Beckett (Mars Wind’s endearing Chicken Wing seems like Lucky’s
luckless cousin from Waiting For Godot) and the political theatre of Dario
Fo, there is an enlightened twinkle behind the eyes of these moronic devils.
Eric Wilcox’s manic Idiot/Papa appears to be the ring leader and his
Monkeyboy (a demonic performer named Riddle) joins with the offensive El
Borracho (the craftily crude Noe Zavala) and Maria, a nose-picking female
who is able to produce money from her bottom (an unpredictable performance
by Nari Tommassetti) to complete the cast of idiots who dance, fornicate,
defecate, merry-make, and expostulate on the state of the human condition.
As a creative ensemble, this group is entirely committed and aggressively
comic. Their boldness has no limits. The relationship between the audience
and the performers is at the core of this type of theatre. I had fake urine
sprinkled at me (moments after it was sprinkled on a flag), I had fake feces
tossed my way, I was insulted directly, I was smelled, I was offended, I
wanted to leave, and yet I was unexpectedly moved by a message both political
and emotional. Moments of grotesque humor give way to moments of genuine
pathos, and then suddenly I felt awful for feeling anything at all. At times,
the buffoons sit in the audience, and serve as a literal reminder that we
are all buffoons in the end. The content is mature and juvenile at the same
time. The games end in violence, the violence ends in laughter, the references
are immediate and topical, and the entire piece is offensive and disturbing,
but you will laugh in spite of yourself. The language is harsh, the humor
is crud!
e, the performers are relentless in taking the audience to the edge of bad
taste, and then are not shy about taking us over the edge several times.
The cast plays on expectations, titillates and aggravates, woos us and then
shuns us a moment later.
The ghoulishly haunting score by Andrew Cushin and Scott Jacobson recalls medieval pageantry, as do the costumes of the buffoons themselves, but make no mistake; these are buffoons for our times. This is an exciting and boldly pure fringe performance.