Off Off Broadway Serves Up Comedy Three Ways

The night that I saw Geoff Sobelle’s “FOOD,” something went wrong—and thank heavens it did. Sobelle is a superb clown, which is another way of saying that he’s in his element when things are going sideways. (Clowns, at least physical comedians like Laurel and Hardy or Buster Keaton, tend to choose the silly, self-defeating path, so any obstacle just makes a task clownier.) Sobelle’s one-man production, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fishman Space, takes place around a massive square table, maybe twenty feet on each side, set with dinner plates, silverware, and a white tablecloth. Thirty audience members are allowed to pull up a chair, while the rest of us sit in theatre seats banked high on three sides. Sobelle is our maître d’, and his affable, unfailingly polite expression exudes patience as his guests foil his attempts to make the evening go smoothly. The pressure builds; his tolerance visibly increases. It’s delicious.

Sobelle comes from the French clowning tradition of Jacques Lecoq, which sees the clown as a sacred innocent—there are no big circus shoes here, no ritual humiliation, no squirting flower. Sobelle, a kind-eyed, compact guy who looks a bit like Stanley Tucci without the Aperol spritz, has developed a practice that inserts this ingénue persona into a meticulously built dreamworld, often one preoccupied with a single idea or image. In “The Object Lesson” (2014), he filled the entire Fishman Space with hundreds upon hundreds of cardboard boxes, packed with, among other things, a miniature car stopped at a miniature stoplight, and the components of a life-size living room—it made us both love and loathe our own piles of stuff. In “HOME” (2017), he built a changeable two-story house to explore the vicissitudes of domestic life. For “FOOD,” he has given up some of his customary splendor, perhaps because his theme this time is unbridled consumption.

Sobelle and his co-director, Lee Sunday Evans, as well as Sobelle’s co-creator, the magician Steve Cuiffo, have designed a loosely connected buffet of events, a kind of cabaret of appetite. For instance, Sobelle, in his waiter’s black and white, performs an extended sleight-of-belly sequence, in which he seems to eat all the leftovers of a dinner, jamming celery stalks down his gullet, along with a packet of lit cigarettes. Each dish requires a different trick in order to make it disappear, but the effect remains: whether he gobbles a raw onion or drains two bottles of red, we reflect on gluttony.

As Sobelle dashes around the table, graciously proffering wine, he quietly urges the audience to pitch in. He presses one theatregoer into taking on sommelier duties (“A dirty little Brooklyn Beaujolais?” she suggests to the group) and guides several others into ordering from a menu. He’ll do anything to fulfill our wishes: in one quick gag, he snowshoes across the trackless ice of the Arctic—which happens to look just like our white tabletop—to catch an Arctic char.

Almost no one gets to eat in “FOOD,” apart from Sobelle himself, though the folks at the table are offered a generous pour. He wants us curious, not sated. There’s an opening meditation on the way hunger drove single-cell organisms to develop mouths, then legs, then weapons. And, in the show’s last gesture, an audience member channels a monologue from Sobelle-as-ventriloquist. The man at the table, with Sobelle’s hands resting lightly on the back of his head, somehow intuits a long, complex list of foods, moving from what we life-forms ate at the beginning (dirt, water) all the way to man’s latest delicacies (Impossible meat, Tofurky). This is where our voraciousness has led us, “FOOD” says—from the unknowable depths of the sea to the Cronut.

For the first time at one of Sobelle’s shows, I found myself thinking, I get it. There’s a certain drumbeat here: man evolved from appetite; now he eats the world. But Sobelle’s own miraculous flexibility (you can’t surprise clowns, because they’re always ready for someone to throw a pie) means that he can create new meaning on the fly. At one point in the show, he reveals an expanse of dirt that has been hiding under the tablecloth, which he converts into a diorama of the Great Plains by marching a family of toy-size bison across it. On the night I went, a theatregoer left a plastic blue sippy cup on the table, and, when Sobelle whisked the cloth away, it didn’t disappear with the rest of the place settings. Suddenly, he and his little bison had to deal with a (comparatively) huge turquoise tumbler, plonk in the middle of the West. Sobelle didn’t ignore it; instead, he gathered his tiny herd around the cup for some quiet contemplation. Were the bison worshipping this alien object? Were they peering into our plastic-laden future? It felt a little like the beginning of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” when the obelisk appears among the apes.

The same week I went to BAM, I saw two other gifted clowns of quite different types, one poignant, one absurdist, and it struck me, as it always does, how good the form is at conveying resolve in the face of adversity. Clowns try their hardest to succeed, but the world has other ideas—if a clown does manage to step over a banana peel, he’ll inevitably fall into an open manhole.

In “Redwood,” Brittany K. Allen’s crisp comedy at Off Off Broadway’s Ensemble Studio Theatre, Tyrone Mitchell Henderson, a willowy comic virtuoso, plays Stevie, a man constantly sending pestering e-mails about Ancestry.com to his unresponsive family. He discovers a genetic connection between his niece Meg (played by Allen) and her white boyfriend, Drew (Drew Lewis), whose ancestor, it seems, enslaved (and had children with) their ancestor. Awkward conversations ensue. The finely tuned ensemble, directed by Mikhaela Mahony, gets constant laughs, but the show’s clear center is Stevie, who is wry and knowing, with a sense of infinite openness that makes the audience see the world through his eyes. In Allen’s most acute touch, she brings the family’s first enslaved forebear, Alameda (Bryn Carter), onstage in the final scene to rail, as a spirit, at her descendants. Alameda hates the idea of her Black family members embracing their (distant) white cousin. But Stevie, as delicate and melancholy as a Pierrot and twice as confident, does not hear her curses. He raises a glass to the past, and he carries on.

Finally, I saw one of our original clowns. “Faust (The Broken Show),” at the experimental Brick Theatre, is a beautiful, prolix, mind-melting adaptation of the first few sections of Goethe’s nineteenth-century masterpiece, which follows a German magister’s idiot bargain with the Devil. The wild-eyed, prospector-bearded Eric Dyer has been making shows for decades with his avant-garde company, Radiohole, but this time he works almost completely alone, as writer, performer, stage manager, board operator, beard-and-chest-hair comber, set designer, and tech crew. If you’re going to sell your soul, no one else is going to help out.

Dyer’s aesthetic involves cartoon-style drawings, outlined with heavy black markers, sometimes worn as masks, sometimes deployed in a terrifying puppet show. These images, such as an angel with the blank eyes of Little Orphan Annie, converse via dialogue balloons, as Dyer rattles off a bizarro text, soapbox-ranter style, that touches on F. W. Murnau’s film version of “Faust,” from 1926, and the impossibility of making money in the arts. The set is a metal-frame box, like a burned-out fairground booth, which Dyer uses as part d.j. station and part micro-theatre—he attaches and detaches his drawings from the frame’s struts using magnets, flinging the illustrations to the ground with some violence when they’re no longer needed. Dyer is intent on a kind of holy failure: he runs technical cues from a cell phone, which he hands to the audience, encouraging them to whack away at the controls, and he tries to invoke a supernatural power by painting a pentacle, an effort that collapses mid-ritual. Is he talking metaphorically about success here? Is the Devil not taking his calls? Yes and yes. For this medieval-meets-downtown super-clown, theatre was first a banana peel, then a manhole. After that, he tells us, it looks like a straight shot to Hell. ♦