stage matters / By William Kowinski

Educating Badger

Digging David Ferney’s The Misunderstood Badger

(April 30, 2009)  The mascot of the University of Wisconsin’s Big Ten football team is (like the state of Wisconsin’s) the badger. There’s a costumed Bucky Badger on the sideline, and thousands of screaming fans identifying themselves as badgers.

But Professor Harold Burroughs of that university takes this badger thing even further. As portrayed by David Ferney in this solo show currently at the Arcata Playhouse, the fictional professor is obsessed by this “noble but misunderstood” animal, and begins to identify with it.

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We see the professor act out scenes in the wild (some in photo projections), recount the childhood origins of his fixation and a dream encounter with a giant badger who has a taste for Scotch and cigars. We hear portions of his badger research lectures, delivered in a faintly Southern, faintly 1930s accent that reminded me at times of actor Charles Ruggles, the fussy big game hunter in the Cary Grant-Katherine Hepburn comedy Bringing Up Baby. But in this piece the humor flashes with surreal discovery, and hints of dread.

Burroughs digs out some badger lore, like early American badger-baiting (sending dogs to harass badgers for entertainment), from which comes the verb “to badger,” describing human behavior towards the animal, not the other way around. Human-badger transference is a theme played in various ways, including Burroughs’ elaborate attempt to learn one badger’s true name.

David Ferney’s wrote this solo show with fellow Four on the Floor member Nick Trotter. Trotter also contributes slide guitar interludes, Greg Lojko handles sound and lights and Bruce Marrs did the painting and construction of the evocative badger hat-mask, which Ferney deploys with comic magic.

In its first official performance of what I presume is still a work in progress, Ferney brought his considerable physical and vocal skills to this character. I experienced the show as entertaining but uncertain. I was intrigued, but never sure where it wanted to go.

For example, the program quotes from Jack London’s Call of the Wild, and it’s clear enough that Burroughs feels that call. If this show’s intent was only to portray a befuddled professor gripped by badgermania, then it could be clearer. Tone determines our attitude. The mad scholar is a comic type that must go back before the Romans, and was in the repertoire of vaudeville-trained comedians, so it’s familiar from movies. Even though this piece seemed to at least nod in that direction (as with the professor’s name of Burroughs, you know, the badger burrows … you dig?) Ferney wasn’t broad or frenetic enough to push this into madcap sketch territory.

Instead, his more deliberate pace suggested the intent to offer a dimensional character, and certainly the professor’s clueless projection and identification with the badger had autobiographical back story, as well as those surreal but also obvious dreams. But that went only so far. For example, apart from his clichéd professor appearance, we don’t learn much about any contrast between his wild yearnings and any academic and civilized life.

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