Courtesy of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company
Another reason to be thankful that the world is probably not ending today is that you have more time to go see Woolly Mammoth’s two-man sidesplitter The Pajama Men.
Not to be confused with Martin McDonagh’s chilling and creepy The Pillowman, The Pajama Men, which runs through January 6, is a delightful opportunity to familiarize yourself with the endless talents of Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez.
Veterans of improv hubs like Chicago and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, these pajama-clad gents are diabolically funny, warped and talented, with versatile rubber-faces (particularly Allen’s) and physical comedy stamina that made me wonder what they were juicing on.
Throughout the 60-minute show, Allen and Chavez thread multiple plots and hundreds of character impersonations together and make a sparse set of just chairs and a stage seem packed with magical scenescapes. Let this be a lesson to all the aspiring Peter Jacksons out there: simple suspension of disbelief is more powerful than the highest frame rate in the world.
The only other guy onstage at all is Kevin Hume, who does the background music with keyboard and guitar and the coolly tender voice of Nick Drake.
They circularly work around these separate story lines, in a way that pays homage to—but never feels like copying—Monty Python’s Flying Circus. A marriage of satire with the absurd (“Would a genius do this?” one character demands, proceeding to “stab himself” in the throat), touched with surrealism (a doctor monitoring his patient’s heart causes the patient to inhale so much that his head “inflates” and “floats off like a balloon”).
Chavez and Allen have been performing together since they met as high-schoolers in Albuquerque. They’ve spent years creating their own style of tickling synergy and clearly crack each other up, like kids at play so lost in their own fun that they haven’t realized recess is over. It’s a world where anything goes, where your own voice echo can break up with you, where French and Chinese become their own combined language.
Here are just a few of the disparate elements that made me laugh:
>> Two doofy British guys reciting terrible facts about nature with utter conviction, like a scene from Parks and Recreation with Aziz Ansari’s Tom Haverford: “That’s a porcupine. Otherwise known as the blowfish of the land.”
>> A confrontation between a robotic parking attendant and a frustrated driver. “Are you trying to fuck me?” the driver asks. “Initating fuck sequence,” the robot monotones.
>> A council meeting between two all-powerful aliens, created by the PJ-men by crudely placing their hands over their faces, talking in a bass muffle that is combination of Lieutenant Worf, Darth Vader and Kang and Kodos.
>> A fantastical, flamboyant “ice beast” who threatens, “I will pull your face-pants down and spank your face!” When asked incredulously what “face-pants” are, the Ice Beast retorts, “Like a turtleneck worn by an idiot.”
>> Biggest laugh of the night came from Allen’s recurring imitation of the South American “Give-It-To-Me,” a parrot-like bird that makes loud, porn-star-orgasmic shrieks.
But just when you’re completely lost in the story along with them, Chavez and Allen will pull you back into the self-awareness that this is all performance, by making some sly nods to their own tropes. At one point the night I attended, they goaded one couple sitting in the front row to make out. And the couple complied!
These scenes could all stand on their own, but right before your very eyes, you get to watch them all rise and converge and come together to make a (somewhat) linear plot. The fact that there are points when you have no clue how we’ll get to the finish-line—it is that aspect that makes this rare kind of uber-long make believe especially exhilarating to watch.
