The Homophobes: A Clown Show

"The Homophobes: A Clown Show" is one of those rare performances that is so utterly anarchic, so obscenely disjointed, so fabulously bad, one wonders if it is in fact a reincarnated "Ubu Roi," the scandalously coarse and cartoonish play by Alfred Jarry that launched the French modernist avant-garde. Watching the show, as I vacillated between mapping out the theater's exit signs and marveling at the plot's Olympic inanity, I couldn't help but be thankful that there is still a place for events like this in New York's increasingly homogenized downtown theater scene. But I wouldn't wish my loved ones to sit through it.

A generous reading of Susana Cook's play is that it stages the brain-twisted illogic of fundamentalist Christian theology, in which the sanctity of life and the demand for stultifying social norms inappropriately cohabitate. The plot centers on an evangelical reverend who has been miraculously impregnated. The announcement sends his parish community into a fury, unable to reconcile such divine intervention with its gender-bending implications. Either the reverend's wife must be a man, or God must be gay, or the child must a spawn of Satan—or all of the above. It's hard to tell. Things don't end well for the reverend, who dies after giving birth to 30 babies, igniting some kind of apocalyptic event, until a dour-looking angel resurrects him. They fall in love and defeat an evil-looking pastor who has taken over the parish—or something like that. Eventually, Cook herself emerges to deliver a surrealistic monologue about genderless divinity, delivering in the process the play's one genuinely funny joke, involving a gay piano. This is the best I can do for plot summary. Robert Saietta, as the reverend, and Tracy Hazas, as his wife, valiantly attempt to bring a consistent humanity to their characters, while the rest of the company channels its confusion into enthusiasm.

I wish the play were as fun as it is irreverent, or that its anti-Christian critique were as devastating as it is vulgar. Instead, the indulgence wears thin, and the meaninglessness exasperates. Jarry himself might have thrown a tomato on stage—and meant it.

Presented by and at Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie St, NYC. Sept. 9–24. Fri. and Sat., 7:30 p.m. (212) 352-3101, (866) 811-4111, www.theatermania.com, or www.dixonplace.org.