There’s something immediately audacious and comical about compressing a voluminous turn of the century literary oeuvre into a one hour performance piece. When said performance is delivered by just two actors, deploying only a hat and a scarf as props, the ante rises significantly. As does the challenge. Such is the project Carrie Brown and Karim Muasher, jointly the Animal Engine production company, set themselves in their show Petunia and Chicken, presently showing as part of the 2014 Frigid Festival at the Kraine Theater. Skillful performers both, trained clowns, they arrive at this year’s event with the accolade of having won last year’s Participants Pick Award for their joint authored show, The Vindlevoss Family Circus Spectacular!

Petunia and Chicken takes as inspiration Willa Cather‘s well regarded literary Prairie Trilogy – My Antonia, O Pioneers!, and Song of the Lark – wide reaching stories illuminating the experience of the agricultural peoples that settled the plain states at the latter end of the nineteenth century. The genius of Cather’s apparently simple narrative style is that it has roots in some of humanities darkest places. While ever respectful, Animal Engine address only surface Cather, mining the humor to be found in characters, tropes, and plot devices which – today – nearly all hold a whiff of nineteenth century corn about them. This is, after all, clowning, but clowning that wishes to breathe some of the finer air found in great literature. Funny, no?

Petunia and her family – father, mother, brother Ambrosz – are immigrants from Europe, looking to settle on cheap land holdings in Nebraska. Their’s is the make-it-rich dream of coming to America. “Chicken” Burden is an orphan – his parents victims perhaps of a similar dream – and grandson of the neighboring property owners. Whilst children, they meet and become fast friends and, as the years pass and parents succumb, shy lovers. Chicken wants adventure and experience, Petunia is dutiful and rooted. The familiarity of this story arc serves Brown and Muasher well, as their formal telling of it is original, imaginative, and at times startling. The writing is clever and there is evident ingenuity of editing and dramatization. We get some memorable invocations of landscape – an essential component of Cather’s world; waving fields of wheat, rhythmic sighing windmill sails, the ceaseless rise and fall of water pumps all mimed by the performers on a blank stage. Brown gives us a touching and hilarious impression of Chicken’s faithful canine companion, smushed face and hunched shoulders, as he tries to keep up with his restless young master. These moments are precious and vivid theater. But the necessary break-neck pace at which the whole thing has to unfold works sometimes to blur the sharpness of personation and gesture.

Additionally, if you overwhelm your central characters with cartoon surroundings and personalities, you shouldn’t be surprised if they partake of some of that cartoonism, and dramatic impact is depleted. So even as your story is building towards an inevitable climax, it is losing air, and the eventual pop is muffled – regardless of how heavy the inverted commas around that pop might be

in the first place. Melinda Jean Ferraraccio’s directing must take some blame here. It wants crispness. Clever and sharp is how to keep things aloft. There shouldn’t be room for the serviceable gesture or allusion, despite the speed of proceedings. First night opening issues aside, this reviewer felt the performance in need of some polish.

One feels Brown and Muasher, imaginative and energetic as they are, can find it. They are shrewd enough to turn the rudimentary lighting set-up they deploy into a moment of fun, when there’s some direct address to the lighting booth controller during the performance. Other than the lighting, they conjure everything else. And however jaded your outlook you’ll be rooting for them throughout. On evidence, Thursday night’s audience certainly were, and seemed utterly taken by them to wherever they traveled, narrative whiplash notwithstanding. Clowns, of course, can be gratuitous crowd-pleasers, but their durable notoriety resides not merely in this fun raising provocation, but ultimately in the canny ability to unsettle. This sweeping, romantic tale of settlers ultimately wants a little unsettling.

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Petunia And Chicken
Inspired by the works of Willa Cather
Created and performed by Carrie Brown and Karim Muasher
Direction from Melinda Jean Ferraraccio

Remaining Performances:
Feb 24, 8:40PM
Mar 03, 10:15PM
Mar 06, 8:40PM
Mar 08, 3:40PM

Click HERE for tickets

Running time: 1 h 0 min
Price: $10.00 – $15.00
Seating: General Admission

The Kraine Theater
85 E. 4th Street
New York , New York 10003
2nd and 3rd Ave
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Horse Trade Theater Group will present the 8th Annual FRIGID New York Festival at The Kraine Theater (85 East 4^th Street between 2^nd Avenue and Bowery) and UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place between 1^st Avenue and Avenue A) February 19-March 9. Tickets are available for purchase in advance at www.FRIGIDnewyork.info or by calling 212-868-4444. 

Related Posts:

• Petunia And Chicken: 10 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2014 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)
• Tina And Amy: Last Night In Paradise (2014 Frigid New York Festival)
• THE CANUCK CABARET (2014 Frigid New York Festival)
• Almost A Genius (2014 Frigid New York Festival)
• Boogie Of The Apes (2014 Frigid New York Festival)

Ten Questions. Ten Answers. And One Big Decision: Rock, Paper, Or Scissors?

Petunia and Chicken

Production Company: Animal Engine

A two person turn of the century epic prairie love story based on the works of Willa Cather.

Show Times:

• Thus 2/20 @ 7:05
• Mon 2/24 @ 8:40
• Mon 3/3 @ 10:15
• Thurs 3/6 @ 8:40
• Sat 3/8 @ 3:40

Answers by Carrie Brown
(Actor and Creator)

1. Your tag line is out there on postcards and press releases so we know the PR version of what this play is about.  But when you talk to your family and friends, how do you explain the show to them?

CB: I tell them that Karim and I play all the characters. I also say it’s funny and strange and sad and really good, so they should just come and see it!

2. Here’s a scenario: After the show some audience members go have a drink.  What’s the part of the show you hope they’re discussing?

CB: The end, but not too loudly.

3. What drives your show – character, theme or plot?

CB: Character.

4. In rehearsals, read-thrus, or prior incarnations, what’s the one thing someone said about the show so far that made you (or the team) the most proud?

CB: Someone said it was a master class in DIY theatre. I though that was cool.

5. Let’s fantasize for a moment. Let’s take the “off-off” off. Imagine this show is on Broadway. Would that change the production itself?

CB: We’d have real light cues and maybe live music, but the simplicity of the show is sort of what makes it so good.

6. Taking that one step further – after paying everyone what they’re worth of course, what is the most lavish, luxurious, pointless thing you would spend money on if there was no constraints?

CB: Bowler hats and scarves for everyone in the audience!

7. Is there a scene, a moment, a gesture … anything at all in the show that you anticipate may get a completely different reaction depending on the audience that night?

CB: I play a dog. Sometimes we can’t continue for a solid minute while the crowd calms down. Other times it’s just polite laughter.

8. What’s your favorite line from the show?

CB: “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.” Willa Cather wrote this one.

9. Is the world of this play sustainable outside a theatre? In other words … do you think people live the way the characters do? Would you want a world where they do?

CB: It’s a very human and relatable story, so yes.

10. You scan the audience and you see a face that stops you dead in your tracks – who is it? And why are you shocked?

CB: Mark Rylance. I invited him, but I didn’t actually think he’d show!

Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament of DEAAAAATH

In the THM virtual Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament of DEAAAAATH which FRIGID Show do you take on? And what do you throw?

CHALLENGES: Questions of the Heart

THROWS: They get Paper, bitches!

CHALLENGED BY:
~ East in Red who threw SCISSORS that’s a LOSS …
~ THE CANUCK CABARET who threw ROCK that’s a WIN!!!
~ Professor Ralph’s Loss of Breath who threw ROCK another WIN!!!

Congratulations on your two wins!   And thanks Petunia and Chicken for participating in The Happiest Medium’s FRIGID New York Festival 2014 Q&A. And for playing our game! You’re officially PAPER in any and all challenges.  You may win, you may lose – who knows! This is how it works in the crazy world of the Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament of DEAAAAATH!

For the rest of you don’t forget to check out  Petunia and Chicken!

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Horse Trade Theater Group will present the 8th Annual FRIGID New York Festival at The Kraine Theater (85 East 4^th Street between 2^nd Avenue and Bowery) and UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place between 1^st Avenue and Avenue A) February 19-March 9. Tickets are available for purchase in advance at www.FRIGIDnewyork.info or by calling 212-868-4444. 

Related Posts:

• YELLING AT BANANAS IN WHOLE FOODS: 10 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2014 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)
• Brownie And Lolli Go To Hollywood: 10 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2014 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)
• Charlotte The Destroyer: 10 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2014 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)
• East In Red: 10 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2014 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)
• I Shall Forget You Presently: 10 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2014 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)