Monday, December 03, 2007

Recap: The System

I didn’t have hardly anything to do on Friday, a welcome breather before the show’s home stretch.  Eliot’s typical role as show-facilitator was trumped, for this one episode, by Best Buddy, our douchebag Big Brother wannabe.  This show was a technically complicated one made all the more difficult by our inability to do a real tech/dress run in the theater.  We also had some pretty dark pieces (finally), which may have alienated some of our audience but ultimately aligned with what we wanted to say about The System.  Our guest comedian, Baratunde Thurston, ended up being a perfect fit, and gave the audience a much-needed break from our Best-Buddy-altaverse.  He did a killer set.  By the end of the show we’d touched on many facets of the system—education, politics and government, social order, the law—without veering into the land of heavy hands.

A small taste of Best Buddy…

As these shows come together at the last minute, it’s often surprising to see how many threads and themes emerge in our material.  On Friday, one of our threads was Mel Gibson.  Who knew he was such an integral part of The System?