Fail Better Productions presents Yoel Wulfhart's 'Cat-a-Strophe'

Fail Better Productions's three-hour (not 110 minutes, as reported) Brechtian nightmare about sex and dating has a kitchen-sink aesthetic, not realism, but rather, "throw in everything but," that dares the viewer to hate it, but rewards those with patience and endurance. Unfortunately, he sabotages his attempt at shock and awe by diluting his message in an onslaught of verbiage that's further slowed by tedious set changes.

The script is particularly weighed down early on by navel-gazing meta-nonsense about the playwright, who sometimes is the character Klutzki (Doug Cashell) and sometimes spoken of as Wulfhart. "Is this a play about a play about a play?" Klutzki asks. Oh heavens, no. But it is.

Get on with it

Okay, we get it: people write plays and perform them, and therefore characters are stand-ins for the writer, or maybe puppets, or...come on, just get on with it.

They finally do, and that's when Cat-a-Strophe rises above that title.

Sometimes bold and occasionally tedious, walking a razor's edge between witty and puerile, Cat-a-Strophe uses direct address and songs to explore the awkward loneliness of extreme horniness. The old trope of women seducing men by tossing their handkerchiefs on the floor, obligating men to pick them up, occurs over and over. Klutzki appeals to a woman's desire to be an actress and casts her in a play -- the one that we're watching.

Wulfhart breaks up interminable talktalktalk (an old euphemism for female anatomy, "carpet," is bandied long after we're ready to move on) by stepping out of the story to perform cute, raunchy songs such as "Eating Pussy," "Tits, Tits," and "Larger Is the Size for Me." Nik Geerken's compositions have a music hall quality that is, yes, reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht, and the cast gamely performs them, shaking rubber dildoes like floppy maracas.

In what resembles a plot, Taiwo Sokan plays Beaver, a woman who inspires lust in Klutzki (or is it Clutzki? Cashell plays both) and Peckerstein/Peckerstien (the division's hard to glean, but that's what the program says), both played by Josh Kirwin. Sokan's thin-to-the-point-of-misogyny character (who must utter "a shmeckl in my hairy taco" more than once) shines when she plays the bad actress, and her Act II scenes of domestic frustration with Kirwin could be a powerful one-act drama on their own. William McHattie is dynamic and fun as CAPPuccino [sic], the self-proclaimed "Greek chorus," and Samantha Solar plays Pussika, a girl who desperately wants to hook up, who sits in a cafe boning up on sex techniques by reading a book titled Tickle His Pickle.

Brave efforts

The cast bravely commits to the material, saying lines like "The playwright has no sense of dramatic flow," without winking at us. They maintain an impressive urgency even through the play's endings (there are at least three, one after the other), when the audience is drained.

It's nice to see someone trying to revive shows at the Papermill Theater, a 50-seat space in a building of artists' studios in a bleak Kensington neighborhood. Hella Fresh Theatre Company and BrainSpunk Theatre tried in years past, but moved on.

Wulfart's script begs for cutting, and for a production that celebrates its excesses with more focus than director Kevin Fennell and Wulfhart's Fail Better Productions's tiny budget provide. The boring set, the abandonment of between-scenes music, the repetitious dialogue, and the over-ambitious themes obscure this Cat-a-strophe's precious kernels of brilliance.