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nytheatre.com review:
2008 New York International Fringe Festival Reviews
Big Thick Rod
Aug 11, 2008
Stanton Wood's dark comedy, Big Thick Rod, begins and ends with a business transaction. Not quite what one expects from a play that features a sexually insatiable wood nymph and her well-endowed handyman. Then again there's nothing predictable about Wood's script—which views all couplings as exploitative business partnerships—or the entertaining streamlined production it gets from Rabbit Hole Ensemble. Director Edward Elefterion employs his trademark minimalist style to great effect, emphasizing the play's themes with little more than Avery Lewis's simple yet evocative light design and a uniformly excellent cast, and comes up with a production that enhances the script's inherent theatricality while cruising along at warp speed.
The trouble begins when Elmer, an uptight lawyer, tells his new bride, Cricket, that they'll have to scale back their current level of sexual activity (approximately 8-9 times a day) to something more manageable (like once a month). Since she's a mythical nymph from the forest, whose charismatic appeal is linked to her voracious sexual appetite, this doesn't sit well with her. So she hires both a kindly gardener, Jerome, and the title character, a wood-chopping he-man who dreams of being a gigolo, to service her. When Elmer catches wind of Cricket's escapades, he cuts off her spending allowance and tells her to have sex like everybody else does—for free. She replies, "I can't ask people to screw me for a hobby. It's a full-time job." Faced with the prospect of impending celibacy, Cricket comes up with a unique solution that starts even more trouble. To say more would ruin Big Thick Rod's many surprises.
As mentioned before, Wood creates a world governed by exploitation and contracts. Elmer tells Cricket right at the start, "Marriage is a contract...It's a legal procedure." Such an outlook would be quite caustic if the play weren't so funny. Wood's keen sense of humor tempers the play's darker undertones and makes them go down smooth. When Elmer urges Cricket to join the law firm's book club, she asks if (and how often) they have sex. "It's a book club, not an orgy," he tells her. Later, after his patience has been tried to the limit, Elmer tells Cricket that she makes "Caligula look like Mister Rogers!" Another character who inexplicably grows a third arm (yep, you read that correctly) laments, "I look like I'm permanently asking for change." Bon mots like those are strewn throughout Big Thick Rod.
The cast does a terrific job putting this material over by playing it totally straight. To single anyone out would be pointless since all the actors are terrific. So let me just say that the show's five-person cast—Arthur Aulisi (Elmer), Matt W. Cody (Big Thick Rod), Tatiana Gomberg (Cricket), Emily Hartford (Burgermeister, a gender-ambiguous businessperson), and Dan Ajl Kitrosser (Jerome)—is giving one of the best ensemble performances in town right now and you should go see them do it.
Written/created by: Stanton Wood
Directed by Edward Elefterion
Presented by Rabbit Hole Ensemble
theatermania review:
FringeNYC 2008:
Roundup #3
Aug 13, 2008 · New York
[Ed. Note: This is the third in a series of TM review roundups of shows in the 12th annual New York International Fringe Festival.]
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You don't have to be a nymphomaniac woodland sprite wed to an uptight lawyer to figure out that the marriage contract can constitute a raw deal. But it's a hilarious premise, which writer Stanton Wood, director Edward Elefterion, and the highly talented minimalists of the Rabbit Hole Ensemble make the most of in Big Thick Rod, at the New School for Drama Theatre. New bride -- and former wood nymph -- Cricket (Tatiana Gomberg) has a perfectly reasonable expectation of sex at least nine times daily, but her stuffy husband Elmer (Arthur Aulisi) presents his counter-offer of once a month ("You could choose the day!").
Cricket uses the giant household checkbook that Elmer ceremonially bestows on her to hire a soft-hearted gardener (Dan Ajl Kitrosser) to "tend her bush," and when he can't meet the quota, try as he might, she finds backup in the well-built form of the title character (Matt W. Cody). Though new to the world of human interaction, Cricket -- having boned up on the ground rules of capitalism while confined to Elmer's study -- quickly learns to drive a hard bargain. Why hire a prostitute when you could pimp him instead? Before long, a dinner party which Elmer has arranged to impress the B&D-inclined banker Burgermeister (cross-dressing Emily Hartford) is disrupted by the sound effects of Rod in the root cellar, pleasuring -- for a pittance -- a very vocal gospel choir. And that's just for starters.
Is marriage itself a socially sanctioned form of prostitution? Is our whole economic system based on the premise that to the exploiter go the spoils? And is unbridled female sexuality scary or what? While contemplating such meaty questions, you get to laugh yourself silly at the absurdist lengths a newly mortal wood nymph will go to outhuman the humans.
-- Sandy MacDonald
