THE BLIND LEADING THE HALF BLIND
“It’s The Devils meets Marat/Sade.” someone said to me.
“Yes,” I responded. “As performed by the Marx Brothers!”
We were talking about the new Zombie Joe’s Underground show, Hosea Nova: A Jealous and Violent Man, Robert Riemer’s wacky baroque take on Hosea, the Biblical prophet of doom (where there’s doom, there’s bound to be restoration).
But, before we get to the matter at hand, I have a confession to make.
I am so enamored of the Zombie Joe aesthetic – of the seemingly endless invention that gets poured into most of his projects – that I fear I may be blind to the chinks in Zombie Joe’s armor. While I endorse this new piece without qualifications as a deliciously mad romp for those who can swallow whole what I call uncivilized dementia (and I do think that, while failure is always a possibility, Riemer and Zombie Joe seem to have been born to collaborate with each other, each knowing the other’s strengths as well as any writer/director partnership in the theater that you can come up with), I did notice, this time around – and it may have been a case of opening night jitters rather than a serious flaw – a certain sloppiness of movement, where, in the past, the visual precision was so dazzling, and a certain shrillness, which may be due to the fact that Riemer’s play is far more verbal than most of the work in the Zombie Joe canon and requires a dependence on language that I’m not always sure is the strong suit of the wonderfully loony company of actors who do for Zombie Joe what the Ridiculous Theatrical Company did for Charles Ludlum.
But, that said, this is a thrillingly nutty play, which has a half-blind Hosea falling madly in love with the blind Theresa Ann, whose healing powers are considered little miracles in the monastery where they all dwell, and who wants to escape with her from the monastery, which, in fact, is a madhouse, a veritable Bedlam where all the twisted inmates carry on ad infinitum about their unique maladies and even perform in a Lunatic Choir, whose version of “Hey Jude” may be the most hysterically funny single bit of business Zombie Joe has ever concocted. What is most improbable, but made palpably probable, is that Theresa Ann, once love is awakened in her, becomes the horniest woman in the world, tearing Hosea’s passion to tatters and setting into motion a lust parade of gargantuan comic proportions. And the cast – Sebastian Munoz, Vanessa Cate, Adam Rutter, Suzanne E. Fletcher, Josh Patton, Tina Preston, Tina Van Berckelaer – throws itself into this crazy quilt with wild – and I do mean wild – abandon.
It is not always clear exactly what’s going on – and reading the play didn’t offer much help, except to impress one with Riemer’s extraordinary gift for the spoken word – but, if you were to visit a mental institution, would you see anything more clearly than you’re permitted to see here? Just enter the world and you might find that laughter is always the best reward, and what cannot be fathomed can still be thoroughly enjoyed. Hosea Nova – or, if you will, the New Hosea – is as bizarre as they come, and Zombie Joe is a master of the bizarre. When the images sharpen and gel, then maybe it will not seem bizarre at all.
photos by Zombie Joe
Hosea Nova: A Jealous and Violent Man
Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group
4850 Lankershim Blvd. in North Hollywood
Saturdays at 8:30 p.m.
ends on December 10, 2011
for tickets, visit Zombie Joe’s