Troy Story: You Odyssey It to Believe It
Mask and Wig Clubhouse
310 S. Quince St.
Until Mar. 30, times vary, $12
(215) 923-4229
www.maskandwig.com
Here at Penn we can easily avail ourselves of numerous performing arts groups both on campus and off, and these are all just fine and dandy. But then there are the times when fine and dandy just don't suffice. For those times, there's Mask and Wig.
This semester the Mask and Wig Club of the University of Pennsylvania brings to us Troy Story: You Odyssey It to Believe It. The production, number 119 in the club's much venerated repertoire, is as riotously funny as ever. This time, as the show's title would suggest, the plot is a riff on the Trojan War - Virgil might as well have handed the joke over on a silver platter.
The action begins just prior to Greece's declaration of war on Troy. Greece is under the leadership of the ineffectual King Agamemnon (Brian Cargo), whose susceptibility to persuasion is only exceeded by his love of children's toys. Within moments of the curtain rising, the empire's foremost hero Protagones (Joshua Head) is literally stabbed in the back. In comes the deliciously evil Antagones (Joshua Burgess, also serving as the production's head writer) who devises a plan for the Greeks to wage a war they "have no idea how to win" (their political commentary, not mine) in the hopes that he will ultimately be able to assume rule of the Greek empire. And with that wonderfully chaotic opening, the side-splitting hilarity ensues.
Absent from the production are many of the key players in classic Trojan War history, including Helen and Hector. In their place, we have Chloe (David Fraga), Protagones's unattractive daughter, and Oriphistecles (Benjamin Kream), Antagones's less-than-evil son. Homer has also been transformed into a blind, sunglass-clad swaying poet … la Stevie Wonder and Achilles into a raucous frat boy. Eschewing the somber for the inane, the plot dabbles in the lives of these characters; bona fide Greek history only makes rare appearances.
The production adheres to Mask and Wig's tradition of topical resonance, but is at its most fun when it allows its burlesque undertones to shine through. In these cases, the boundaries between male and female are not merely obscured, but completely obliterated. Between the men playing women who play men and men playing men who play women, the performance is a no-holds barred extravaganza.
Yet it should be noted this is not the kind of crude humor that has critics lamenting the mental degeneration of our nation's youth. In fact, the writing is absolutely spot-on while the songs are expertly crafted. If you go, be careful to pay attention to how the writers over at Mask and Wig cleverly lampoon historical minds in the vein of Pythagoras and Socrates.
Once again, the Mask and Wig Club has lived up to its mantra of "Justice to the Stage and Credit to the University." Leaving the theater after the Club has completed their customary Rockettes-style number, you have no doubt that, as the song affirms, "there's only room for one"
