SFARTS.org, August 31, 2004

"Dog Act": Post-Apocalyptic Vaudeville

-- by Jean Schiffman

New York playwright Liz Duffy Adams still remembers the traveling, supermarket-parking-lot "fun fairs" of her childhood: the tattooed men, terrifying and attractive, like visitors from another world; the lure of dark magic.
A former actor, and graduate of Yale's School of Drama and New York University's Experimental Theatre Wing, Adams loves Shakespeare and experimental theater, craves an epic-sized canvas on which to paint her wildly imaginative scenarios and thrills at the idea of language that is "untraveled, unhindered, unhobbled." "Even if my work is personal—people in love, people betraying one another, rescuing one another," she says, "it's in a context that's vast, complex, geopolitical, historical."

In "Dog Act's"' menacing alt-world, the only literature that has survived is Shakespeare and "Peter Pan." Thus the two scavengers are essentially Neverland's Lost Boys "who grew up and will kill you and eat you," says Adams. They worship "The Wendy," now deceased. Zetta and Dog call to mind the hapless duo in Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," though not by design: "A part of my soul must be steeped in the Beckett world," says Adams. And their sole possession, a cart overflowing with the flotsam and jetsam of their patchwork, post-Armageddon lives, inadvertently resembles the trademark wagon in Brecht's "Mother Courage."

Of the language, Adams explains, "They've evolved their own patois over decades or centuries. It's a kind of [linguistic] free-for-all." She wrote it simultaneously with the characters, plot and theme; each element of the script informed the other. She denied Zetta the "to be" verb. "Zetta's the one character of the four vaudevillians who is not in disguise," says Adams. "She is who she is. She doesn't need to say 'I am.' I think of her as a kind of profane Buddha."

"Liz's work in general creates completely new worlds that are somehow recognizable," says Kent Nicholson. He directed Adams' "Wet" in New York and has been at the helm of "Dog Act" since its development stage at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival in 2002. He observes that Adams always insists on an ethnically diverse cast: "She's reflecting our own society through the lens of these imaginary societies."

Nicholson sees "Dog Act" as a kind of "Bob Hope/Bing Crosby road movie—the two buddies heading off for China. And there's that [Beckettian] existentialist/absurdist take on the world. Zetta and Dog will never reach China ['With any luck, we'll never get there,' quips Dog], but it's the trying that's important. It has the same kind of metaphoric power as Godot."

Playing Zetta, whom Adams calls the "heart and soul of the play," is Shotgun regular Beth Donohue. Zetta's odd speech patterns, says Donohue, make sense emotionally: "If I respond intuitively, it works. It's like in a musical where you suddenly burst out singing because you're experiencing an emotion that can't be expressed any other way. For Zetta, this language is the most expressive way for her to communicate. There are no wasted words."

A travel-weary Zetta says things like, "I tell you what, Dog, this do suck. This do suck…. How are we going to perform for the King of China when we get there? No Mortality Play, no orchestramie, no dancing gillies, no freaks, not even."

"Nada mucho," agrees Dog.

For his part, Shotgun Players artistic director Patrick Dooley says that the 13-year-old, Berkeley-based company is more focused than ever on nurturing ground-breaking playwrights like Adams and developing new plays. "We have the reputation of being these junkyard dogs," he says, of Shotgun's aesthetic. "We've done Shakespeare in a parking lot. Our audiences love language that's almost encrypted, with multiple meanings." For Shotgun, Adams—who loves theatrical mystery and eschews the predictable, "well-made" play—is a perfect match. Dooley was also drawn to "Dog Act's"' mix of the comic and the heartbreaking. "That double helix, that's what our human experience is like," he says.

For those who perceive her plays as nihilistic, Adams concedes there's room for that, but she herself sees them as being about "the violent destruction of ordinary life," with hopeful endings. Is she herself hopeful? "No, I'm deeply pessimistic, but with an irrational optimism. You know how when you were a kid you got excited about the idea of [the extinction of] dinosaurs, and how old the sun is, and how humans have been around for about five seconds [relatively speaking]? Well, I never got over that…. That's my worldview. Which is not necessarily as gloomy as it sounds."
Or, as Zetta sings, "Critter in the river, critter in the sea/Don't know nothing and they happier than me…/I got the human blues…"