- OTHER MEDIA
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- Lobster's 'Pure Shock Value' splatters snark, vital fluids
- SF Chronicle March 3, 2009 (Robert Hurwitt)
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- Think the Hollywood satire has been done to death? Think again. Though
playwrights and filmmakers have been skewering Tinseltown greed, corruption,
desperation and delusion for eight decades, Matt Pelfrey's "Pure Shock
Value" is hilarious proof that the well is far from dry. Pelfrey takes
familiar tropes, snarks them up and drives them to death and beyond.
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- The second world premiere, and only the second full-length play produced
by the 12-year-old sketch-comedy troupe Killing My Lobster - the first
was Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's smash hit "Hunter Gatherers" - "Shock"
opened Friday in a generally sharp staging by Laley Lippard at Exit Theatre.
Designer Emily Greene's low-life living room sets us up for a visit with
comically hopeless wannabes, but even its grungily detailed neglect doesn't
give away the outrageous depths to which Pelfrey's movieland bottom-feeders
can descend.
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- It starts a bit slow as Pelfrey establishes the desperately delusional
high hopes of Chris Yule's stodgy would-be director Ethan and his movie-manic
kid brother, Tex (Justin Lamb), while they wait for Ethan's lover, Gabby
(Erin Carter), to return from pushing their latest project (the trailer
can be found at www.barkingspidersthemovie.com). Carter's arrival raises
the energy, acting and comedy levels several degrees. Calum Grant helps
kick the action into the realm of hilarity when his battered, filthy, semiconscious
body is dragged in from the backyard.
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- Blood, semen, drugs and movie references get splattered about. Pelfrey,
resident playwright for Los Angeles' Furious Theatre, may be the first
to squeeze acts of pedophilia and necrophilia into one play or to put Viagra
to really comic use. Rarer still, the more over-the-top his satire gets,
the funnier and more acute it becomes, and the more Lippard and her cast
rise to the occasion. What starts in the middle of a lonely sex act climaxes
in an even lonelier one that is strangely fulfilling
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