The Day Everything Went Wrong

continued

In The Day Everything Went Wrong, a man (Tulip), a woman (Laurel Hufano), and a gawky boy (Brendan McMahon) reinvent the rituals of daily family life: washing, cooking, dressing, kid going off to school, Dad going off to work, Mom staying home and taking more pills. Working as an ensemble, and each with brilliant solo arias, they mime the well-worn tropes of human experience, but as you've never quite seen them before: props dissolve or appear; movements are familiar, props are not; or props are familiar and movements are not. Songs intrude. Pasty bodies suddenly become taut and full of intention; taut bodies suddenly become puffy and inert. It's an amazing amalgamation of visual spectacle, physical invention, and all the theatrical arts, stuffed into an all-too-short hour and a half.

The Day Everything Went Wrong completes its monthlong run on Sunday, September 7.

[Review published September 2008]