500 Clown Macbeth
500 Clown
Actor-acrobat Adrian Danzig takes his clowning seriously. Even when he’s playing the fool–as he does in 500 Clown Macbeth, a three-person send-up of Shakespeare’s tragedy–he performs with awe-inspiring concentration and precision. In dangerous bits worthy of Buster Keaton, Danzig shows he’s a devotee of the craft of clowning as propounded by Cirque du Soleil, the Big Apple Circus, and a handful of smaller circuses that have sprung up in the last 30 years.
?Actor-acrobat Adrian Danzig takes his clowning seriously. Even when he’s playing the fool–as he does in 500 Clown Macbeth, a three-person send-up of Shakespeare’s tragedy–he performs with awe-inspiring concentration and precision. In dangerous bits worthy of Buster Keaton, Danzig shows he’s a devotee of the craft of clowning as propounded by Cirque du Soleil, the Big Apple Circus, and a handful of smaller circuses that have sprung up in the last 30 years.
Danzig is also the mastermind behind the first “City of Fools: Chicago’s Clown Theater Festival,” a three-weekend event that’s at least as risky as anything he does in 500 Clown Macbeth. But sitting through this year’s offerings it was hard not to wish every performer shared Danzig’s devotion and perfectionism. Of the four pieces I saw, only 500 Clown Macbeth felt fully formed and rehearsed. The plot is simple: three clowns attempt a low-budget, high-concept Macbeth, a production that puts them in some physical danger. The challenges they face will be familiar to anyone who knows Chicago’s non-Equity scene. The set looks cool but is extremely precarious–in one of the show’s running gags, one part after another collapses. And the performance is beset by every imaginable mishap: missed cues, lighting problems, “spectacular” moments that fall flat. Danzig and coconspirators Paul Kalina and Molly Brennan perform this intensely physical comedy with energy, daring, and grace. I last saw Kalina in the Flying Griffin Circus as one half of a skillful but conventional clown act, the Bumblini Brothers. Many of their gags were aimed at younger viewers and based on the duo’s childish vanity and inflated sense of their own abilities. And the kids roared every time the Bumblinis fell on their faces, whether literally or figuratively. But in 500 Clown Macbeth Kalina does something much harder: by turns aggressive and fearful, victim and victimizer, he creates a clown persona as real as any Shakespeare character. Brennan, best known to me from her work with the improv-influenced Factory Theater, also blew me away. Courting danger, at one point she falls a good 15 feet, breaking through two trapdoors. 500 Clown Macbeth is classic clowning, as these three aim again and again for nobility and profundity–and fail.? Jack Helbig, Chicago Reader April 6, 2001Performers
Adrian Danzig, Molly Brennan, Paul Kalina