stage matters / By William Kowinski

Freaks Are Really Greeks?

A promising work in progress at the Arcata Playhouse

(April 10, 2008)  Theatre can be most alive when it is rough and unfinished. Some of the most exciting performances I’ve witnessed have been staged readings, script-in-hand or living room cold readings. But what I saw and heard last week at the Arcata Playhouse is more than the raw and even intuitive attempt to explore dramatic material — it’s the living process of creating a play through collaboration, which can include the audience.

The piece under construction is Crawdaddy: A Freak Tragedy, produced by Dell’Arte, together with Arcata’s Four on the Floor Productions and a troupe from Canada that specializes in mask work and puppetry, the Calgary Animated Objects Society, or CAOS. As is often the case here, all these roads lead back to the Dell’Arte Company and school, which many of the participants have in common.

Jim Griffiths as Crawdaddy and Jackie Dandeneau as his wife, The Fat Lady, in ‘Crawdaddy: A Freak Tragedy,’ playing this weekend at the Arcata Playhouse. Photo by Carol Eckstein.

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Script and song lyrics are by Toby Mulford, music by Tim Gray; the director is Stephen Buescher, and head designer is Xstine Cook, the founder of CAOS.

Only an insider could accurately describe the nature of the ongoing collaboration, but, as most group efforts do, it results in iterations — successive versions that reflect new creative insights, responses to observations of performances by insiders and audiences, as well as technical improvements. So each performance at this stage is likely to be different.

As might be expected with these particular companies, this production is developing puppetry, costumes, props, sound and lighting effects right along with the script, so there is plenty to see and hear (including singing and instrumental performances). Beginning last Saturday and continuing this Thursday, Friday and Saturday (April 10-12), audiences are formally brought into the process with question-and-answer sessions after the show.

Crawdaddy is about a troupe of sideshow “freaks” that is also a family, with San Francisco Mime Troupe veteran James Griffiths as Crawdaddy (which may be a pun on “claw-daddy,” because he’s got crab claws for hands, and he becomes the patriarch of the clan); Jacqueline Dandeneau in an immense fat suit as his Fat Lady wife; Zuzka Sabata and Esther Haddad as their Siamese Twin-daughters; Tyler Olsen as the son-in-law Val, and David Ferney speaking through a sinister puppet as The Barker. Jerry Lee Wallace is the Outside Talker (who was literally outside talking up the performance before it started, promising “David Spade live,” which is certainly my idea of a freak show).

I caught a dress rehearsal and the opening night performance, and there were changes even in the day between. At least one wasn’t planned. Jackie Dandenau, who had been so expressive and animated in rehearsal, had become so physically disoriented by the fat suit that she almost didn’t go on for opening night, and her performance was more subdued, especially at first.

The knowledge I brought with me to that rehearsal concerning “freaks” — people with real, exaggerated and fake deformities who made their living as exhibits or performers — was pretty limited. There were still some freak shows attached to traveling carnivals when I was a child, though I never entered one, and in the ‘70s I did see the 1932 Todd Browning film (Freaks) with actual freak show performers as the actors. In that movie, the “freaks” were the honorable ones, while a couple of “normal” people in the circus were the villains.

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