Review: The B. Beaver Animation at The Off Center [Theater]

The best days at my elementary school were assembly days, when local tap dance troupes or puppet theaters leaped around our cafetorium stage while we sat, cross-legged, in awe of them. These performers traveled light--a costume trunk, a canvas backdrop, maybe some flash paper--but to the kindergarten set, their rickety props and pyro were transporting. We didn't see a bearded dude in a pair of fuzzy ears, whiffing a cardboard sword under the fluorescent lights; we saw Puss-in-Boots.

Rude Mechs

The B. Beaver Animation at the Off Center
Thursday-Sunday through November 13
Off Center Theater (2211-A Hidalgo)
$0-25, 8 pm
[info] | [tickets]

An adult version of this magic is at work in The B. Beaver Animation, the second of the Rude Mechs' shot-for-shot re-imaginings of seminal performance works. Originally a 1974 Mabou Mines production, B. Beaver is, on one hand, a playful and obtuse poem, the ballad of a stuttering aquatic rodent toiling to save his family from disaster. But it is also an hour of ramshackle spectacle, a celebration of how shrewd theater artists can MacGyver a world out of a few key production values.

The impressive set, originally a gallery installation by Tina Girouard, is ten feet of raked wood and garish fabric. It looks like Huck's raft, or the flats of a nineteenth-century medicine show, and it changes shape like Optimus Prime. The company of six - dressed in their PJs, like the Darling children - dismantles and re-assembles the set several times, often re-appropriating two-by-fours and dowels to serve as oars, or sound effects instruments, or beaver tails.

As they clamber all over the shape-shifting set, there are little vaudevillian tricks with flashlights, sheet metal, and fire. The night I saw the show, the crowd oohed and ahhed like second graders at choice moments, like a bucket that burst into flame or an empty bathrobe beautifully animated by eight long marionette sticks.

Along with this low-fi show biz comes remarkable ensemble work. If anything, B. Beaver is an exercise in collaboration. Rarely does a cast member perform any stage business single-handedly (or even double-handedly). The actors lean on each other, sharing limbs and feet and various other body parts to create the inhabitants of the fractured dam. Many lines are delivered in chorus, or in difficult-to-master staggered rounds.

Their group work is so thick that it is difficult to untangle the cast for individual commendation, though Robert Pierson's sonorous Beaver is a vibrant, droll engine, and Adriene Mishler delivers the best impression of a slow-motion trout this side of the cafetorium.

In this lovely resurrection, director Shawn Sides and company build a piece that is half kiddie magic show, half garbled morality tale. The play treats us to a pleasure unique to live theater-- how a savvy, polished ensemble can make wondrous worlds out of thin air-- and then spackles that showmanship with a darker, and very grown-up, sense of foreboding: Mister Beaver and Friends have an Existential Crisis. It is the balancing act of these two energies that make B. Beaver both a challenge and a delight. See it twice.