Bomb Shelter: or the Modern Pinocchio
Gallery Theater, Austin Community College Rio Grande campus, through July 5
Running time: 1 hr
What do you do after surviving the last night of the world? Well, that depends on whether you had enough foresight to stock your post-apocalypse love nest with something other than basic provisions. In the unfortunate case of Kris and Mike Waggoner, ample stores of beans and water were laid in, but the young couple sadly neglected to furnish their refuge with anything for whiling away the time between meals. No Monopoly. No Scrabble. Not even a lousy deck of cards.
Still worse, no books.
Mike and Kris sealed themselves away from the world with nothing to read, and with the world having just gone kablooey – the exact nature of the catastrophe is never made clear, but there’s an allusion to radiation – they have no way to obtain anything to read. As far as these two are concerned, the only literature left is what’s inside their heads, what they had already absorbed before the last big bang. As such, they must become each other’s libraries, calling up every detail of every novel, play, or song they can and bringing it back to the world through their own voices. It’s a somewhat laborious process when they’re working separately, so they eventually hit on the idea of resurrecting a literary work together. Their choice, fittingly enough, is a tale deeply concerned with reanimation, Frankenstein. And we watch them do to Mary Shelley’s novel what Victor did to his patchwork corpse.
The premise of this new play by Tongue and Groove Theatre Artistic Director Mark Stewart may be unlikely – really, no one salted away some John Grisham beach read, even, or this month’s Vanity Fair? – but if you can buy into it, you’ll find yourself ambling down a refreshingly different road than most such after-the-bomb fables. Instead of forcing its trapped protagonists to discover how much they truly loathe each other, thus turning their existence into a living hell, Bomb Shelter allows its couple to remain affectionate and confront their confinement in a spirit of amity. They’re a second take on Adam and Eve, not out to repopulate the planet (a reference to Mike’s vasectomy ensures that’s not in the cards) but to regenerate the culture. Elizabeth Doss’ ebullient Kris and Jason Newman’s lively Mike – about as winning a duo as you could hope to be locked in a bomb shelter with – romp and stomp across the stage in their pajamas, sketching in broad vaudevillian strokes the characters and scenes from Shelley’s great work, and their actions speak to that very human impulse to create. We want, maybe even need, to tell stories and play, and when we do, we’re Frankenstein with his creature or Gepetto with his puppet: delivering an animating spark into something inert. In many ways, this two-actor, one-hour production is a modest exercise, but it gets at something basic in us, and with its high spirits and open heart, its sense of exploration, its willingness to wear pillows on its head and to roar, and its commitment from two gifted, funny performers, it’s alive. It is most assuredly alive.
This article appears in June 27 • 2008.