If Hell had an open mic night, hosted by sexually precocious third graders, I imagine it'd be something like "Consume: A Grotesque Burlesque." In a series of one-act performances (with the term "act" used loosely, as some of them were merely read aloud), "Consume" is a half-assed attempt at multi-media absurdity, where burgers masturbate and a lesbian can be seduced by a blow-up doll (which also poses as her ventriloquist dummy). On some abstract level, these performances might've meant something, but if you can't even be bothered to make your projected images FIT on the screen you're using, then that profound laziness is going to translate to the rest of the production. In fact, if the play weren't so shoddily thrown together, it'd be naggingly unremarkable, except perhaps during one brief scene of nudity.
"Consume" is third-rate performance art, full of dead ends and non sequiturs: one minute a guy is singing folk songs about New Orleans, the next minute a girl in a mask is doing strip karaoke while images of skydivers soar behind her on a screen. There's no continuity, no point, just a jumble of images and inappropriate food references masquerading as a "theme." Take this description of one of the scenes: "Buddhist in nature, this soufflé is everything interconnected through emptiness. Cooked with a 'Stream of Consciousness' oven, the art forms and lyric poetry melt together."
Something could be said for the actors' general enthusiasm – they seemed quite happy to be there, unlike the rest of us – but as one stops praising their child's ability to color within the lines around age 6, I similarly refuse to applaud a production's self-congratulatory tendencies, regardless of whether I see the cast members' nipples.
In what appears to be a commentary on the ways we consume (Art? Culture? Hamburgers?), the play comes off not only as sloppy, but as sloppy seconds.
Reviewed by Centerstage!
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