The Kharmful Charms of Daniil Kharms

Schkapf
Through June 28

RECOMMENDED:

Photo: Courtesy Schkapf

Chief among the many reasons to see ARTEL’s remount of their 2010 music hall of Futurist-Absurdist sketches by the Soviet avant-gardist Daniil Kharms is the matchless opportunity for the polished and entertaining introduction it provides to its author.

Director and adaptor Olya Petrakova, co-adaptor/performer Bryan Brown and a 12-member ensemble (with musical accompaniment by Jef Bek & Ensemble) tackle around 20 of Kharms’s meta-fictional writings — notebook fragments, short-short “stories” and abbreviated playlets — whose ribald and parodic riffs on random violence, death and non-sequitur wordplay might best be described as a vaudeville blend of Beckett, Abbott and Costello, and the Three Stooges by way of Kafka.

At the heart of the evening — and Kharms’ surreal oeuvre — is the mordant Russian sense of humor in extremis. Kharms and his OBIERU writers collective date from the period of Stalin’s consolidation of power when ordinary Soviet life began to take on a harrowingly absurdist quality. Kharms himself died in a manner worthy of one of his own fictions by starving to death in an insane asylum during the siege of Leningrad.

That flavor of black, fatalistic burlesque gets summed up in bits during which a Harpo Marx-like clown is suddenly beaten to death with an oversized cucumber, a piece in which a pair of lovers are suddenly interrupted and carried off by Cheka agents, a portrait gallery scene wherein the relative merits of Pushkin and Gogol are discussed by a literary critic and that quickly devolves into a wrestling match between the two authors, and matching sketches featuring first a group of women and then men describing the erotic olfactory qualities of female genitalia (“Should one be ashamed of ones own body?” a later piece asks).

And if no English translation can adequately convey the homonymous nuances or punning interplay embedded in Kharms’s Russian-language poetics, The Kharmful Charms of Daniil Kharms’ precision ensemble and Petrakova’s well-oiled, if somewhat overlong, 90-minute production deliver a worthy approximation of what may be the next best thing.—Bill Raden

Schkapf, 6567 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd.; through June 28. https://Hollywoodfringe.org/projects/1885?tab=tickets.

Anita Bryant’s Playboy Interview

Hudson Guild Theatre
Through June 28

Photo by Paul Stein

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since former Miss Oklahoma and evangelical anti-gay gadfly Anita Bryant waged her successful, 1977 campaign to repeal Dade County, Florida’s pioneering ordinance that banned discrimination based on sexual orientation.

But as the ongoing national battles over marriage equality and this week’s embrace of gay conversion therapy by Texas Republicans attest, the struggle for LGBT rights in this country is hardly over.

Which is perhaps the best endorsement for the continued relevance of John Copeland and Robert Whirry’s canny political caricature of Bryant’s outrageous bigotry in a script mostly culled from the June, 1978 Playboy interview conducted by Ken Kelley (played here by Stephen Simon).

The leading edge of the satire is contained in Copeland’s restrained drag impersonation of Bryant, replete with Okie accent and red bouffant wig, in which the actor allows the former Florida Citrus Commission spokesperson to damn herself with her own words.

What follows is a camp compendium of Bryant’s more ludicrous pronouncements, such as her extended and befuddled exegesis on how “homosexuals eat the male sperm” that is the biblical “life essence” and “forbidden fruit” and is therefore banned by the Bible.

Despite the pinpoint hilarity of Copeland’s delivery and Paul Stein’s able and brisk direction, however, the 80-minute show could easily lose a good 20 minutes. By a not-so-strange coincidence, that is just about the running time added by the show’s inclusion of the probably unnecessary historical context and arch tone of righteous moral indignation provided by Brett Paesel as the show’s superfluous narrator and as the June, 1978 issue’s centerfold Gail Stanton.—Bill Raden

Hudson Guild Theatre, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., www.Hollywoodfringe.org/projects/1695

 These reviews are offered via a partnership between L.A. Weekly and Stage Raw. To maximize coverage of the Hollywood Fringe Festival, the two publications are sharing reviews and funding responsibilities. Stage Raw is an Emerge Project of the Pasadena Arts Council, with other funding coming from a combination of advertising and individual donors.  For the L.A. Weekly, please visit www.laweekly.com