Ethan Lindhout, one half of the comedy duo “Ethan & Gigi.” Photos by Andrew Karpan.
An avante-garde show spoofing the Bush presidency makes a stop in East Williamsburg before it embarks on an international tour.
By Andrew Karpan
EAST WILLIAMSBURG — Before they take the revolution to Edinburgh Fringe, local clowns Ethan Lindhout and Gigi del Rosario have been testing it out in the back room of a warehouse in East Williamsburg.
“This is real revolution through the power of theater,” says del Rosario at the start of “The Movement,” the latest show the pair have put together, which played to a crowdy of some twenty people at a three-night run inside Makers’ Space (“A Premier Artistic Hub for Multi-Hyphenates” reads a sign on the door.”) At one point, del Rosario baits the crowd by asking them: “Who here just wants to destroy some property?”
Dressed, and occasionally undressed, in mini-berets, the pair’s enthusiastic, post-Occupy, post-Brace Belden take on the political inanity of the Bush years was moving, funny and sometimes stirring. By the time it ended, a bearded, breakdancing, surprise-entry Osama Bin Laden was hobbling around with an air airplane-shaped balloon around his ankles before picking up a guitar and vigorously sing-rapping “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” the coda to numerous homages to the 9/11 experienced through endless documentaries and vaguely lived-through as a longstanding dramatic shadow hanging over a generation of New Yorkers. He’s part of a quirked up cast of supporting characters, including Jason Driver, Kiki Milner, Bob Stachel and Siddharth Raj, as a collection of fellow-comrades, secret FBI agents and so on.
But at its emotional center are del Rosario and Lindhout, a pair who have been performing versions of this semi-improvised character work for a while as “Ethan & Gigi,” a comedy duo who have been moving through the city’s clown scene, from spots at Matthew Silver’s avant-clown variety show “The Idiot’s Hour” to regular spots in “Fool Around The Block,” a clown queer clown show run out of the backroom of various bars and coffeeshops in Bushwick. They are clowns who perform without the traditional makeup and, instead, outfit themselves like disgruntled dancers, with moves out of old “Spy vs. Spy” cartoons, dressed like disgruntled mimes, who snap loudly and bicker at each other, are hopelessly in love, if not with each other, than with themselves.
The clowns performed a political satire called “The Movement.” Photos by Andrew Karpan.
“The Movement” is, perhaps, their masterpiece of immersive and occasionally interactive performance theater, a largely two-man show, centered somewhat on the interpretive 9/11 material, which the pair first performed at the SoHo Playhouse last year, and plan to bring to Edinburgh later this year. A pointedly slapdash – and throughout an extended retelling of Adam & Eve, occasionally nude – meditation on the impossibility of collective action, their energy as performers is infectiously earnest, pointing at everything and nothing with rollicking ease. On their merch table, they sell mugs that read, in lowercase font: “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my revolution.”
“We are on the precipice of revolution,” del Rosario announces to occasion bursts of laughter.
It make sense, perhaps, that her targets are more theater kid than revolutionary: “Hamilton is pablum propaganda posing as the revolution with the power of theater, but really it’s just little breadcrumbs of the myth of representation while it also distracts us from the fact that America was built on the basis of genocide and slavery,” she says, about twenty minutes before leaning onto ‘Hamilton’-piano chords for an extended rap session about drone strikes. Later, they do a faithful version of “Bad Romance,” too, and with as much fervor and sincerity as any other off-off Broadway Moulin Rouge-style variety show getting by in the outskirts of Bushwick.
At its heart, “The Movement” is about the inescapability of 2000s Iraq war punk nostalgia, which was, in its own forceful, vaguely misremembered, Green Day lyrics way, a kind of political antecedent to indie sleaze. Even the revolutionary berets, an essential part of both del Rosario’s Lindhout’s costumes, feels reappropriated with a sincerity its forebears could never have imagined. They look like they belong in any decade but the present, which is what perhaps makes them belong so firmly in Brooklyn.
