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Volunteer Actor Improves on Keanu Reeves Performance

A A A Comments By Quinton Skinner Wednesday, Jan 26 2005

Pinwheel Theatre

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Now here's a show that manages stupidity squared: It takes a stupid movie (the 1991 Keanu Reeves train wreck that's always playing on cable when you're hungover and alone) and stages it with maximum asininity. You simply cannot help but laugh. Each night the Keanu role is played by an audience member, and on opening night last Thursday the involuntary thespian was a good-natured young guy with a lopsided grin who became more Keanu-like as the evening wore on (sample dialogue: "Pull the fucking 'chute!"). Director Jamie Hook staged this show all over the Pacific Northwest, admitting in a phone chat that it's the dumbest and most successful endeavor he's put together. It's a cops-and-robbers tale mixed with extreme sports, which requires the actors to engage in the most low-budget takes on skydiving and surfing imaginable. Which is not to say that the play lacks a sense of danger; Vanessa Hoff as the ostensible stage manager flings herself and Keanu's cue cards about with a maniacal lack of regard for anyone's well-being, and the lucky soul who plays Keanu is required to jump out of a plane and wipe out on his/her surfboard. In fact, Hook recounted a story of a woman in Olympia, Washington, who, while portraying Keanu, performed the skydiving scene with an assumption of a safety net--and summarily executed a face-plant onstage. No such accidents transpired last week, although this writer was grabbed at gunpoint and shoved into a closet (I was allowed to slink back to my seat after a time). This seems like a show that will grow much more moronic with time, which is of course a compliment. The audience last week was surprisingly small, given the assumption that energetic idiocy for 10 bucks represents a sort of theatrical bargain, and as a result the lift-off of communal dumbass glee was achieved only sporadically. Subsequent performances should find their groove, and their audience. It'll never be done the same way twice, and it'll never make a bit of sense.

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