Philly Fringe 2024: Cambria House presents Henry Clatt’s BODYSHOP

Bodies of work

Now running at Cambria House, a music space/art collective/home in Kensington, BODYSHOP is a one-act comedy that follows two roommates who stumble upon a body bag and bring it back to their living room. The body inside, though, turns out to be alive, part of a lifestyle scheme by the Germans, or perhaps the Mormons, to eradicate the fear of death. The play’s increasingly gonzo series of escalations mostly don’t add up—especially by the end, where the whole thing finally capsizes—though it’s not without some genuine chuckles, buoyed by a dash of old-school lo-fi Fringe charm.

Where the show really clicks is in the dynamic between the two roommates, a classic Odd Couple-style pairing made fresh through the duo’s modern idiosyncrasies. Jinks (Grant Evans) is a high-strung DJ who can’t seem to catch a break; Benny (Max Marin) is a laid-back lifestyle podcaster who peddles Ketergy (the world’s first ketamine-infused energy drink) to his audience of disillusioned young men. They react to the body bag much as you’d expect—Evans wound into a ball of tension, Marin with a sleepwalker’s blissed-out gait—and their resultant chemistry is what keeps the play afloat. The Cambria House space also goes a long way in lending the piece a makeshift realism, an incense-suffused Kensington garage that is essentially the play’s exact setting.

Oddly charming

Much of what follows from here, though, threatens to sink the show, a barrage of twists and conceptual explosions that leave the play without a sense of orientation. In particular, Marta (Ximena Conde)—the play’s third character inside the body bag—falls victim to the plot’s absurdities. Conde plays the part well enough, but too often, we don’t have a clear sense of who this character is or what she knows. Even a madcap satire like this asks for a certain level of internal logic. Before we can get a handle on the situation, though, the script pulls the rug out from under us yet again.

The direction compounds this disorientation. Much of the blocking is ceaseless pacing, injecting scenes with an initial sense of urgency but also, for its monotony, causing them to peter out. The show’s rhythm ultimately feels akin to that of a guy telling you about some insane shit he heard or perhaps recalled from a dream: occasionally entertaining but too scattershot to amount to anything coherent.

But still, there’s a lot of charm to be found in a piece like this. The company feels like a bunch of friends who invited you over to their garage—particularly for the winsome efforts of Evans and Marin—for the kind of shoestring-budget backyard theater that makes Cannonball look like the Wilma. Even if it fizzles out in the end, it’s hard to resist the uneven flavor of a home-cooked meal.