Shlammer: A Gangster-Vaudeville (review)

Shlammer: A Gangster-Vaudeville. By Dan Froot. Los Angeles Theater Center, Los Angeles. 9 August 2001.

First, a little quiz. Dan Froot's Shlammer is: (a) A bar mitzvah disguised as performance art; (b) An exercise in Brechtian alienation that, strangely, never fails to entertain; (c) An unsettling look at the sadomasochistic comedy that goes by the name of slapstick; (d) A feminist warning against the sins of the fathers becoming the sins of the sons. The answer of course is (e), or all of the above, and much of Shlammer's force comes from its shrewd handling of theatrical and emotional incongruities.

Froot's seventy-minute playlet, subtitled A Gangster-Vaudeville, begins with the performer addressing the audience from the well below the stage. His pin-stripe suit is a few sizes too small, his white socks poking out from between his pants and shoes. A coat hanger is still inserted at the back of his coat, and as a result his shoulders seem forcibly hunched in a tough-guy pose. When Froot starts instructing the audience in the protocols of the performance, he speaks with an allusive clenched-jaw effect that places him somewhere between Cagney's Public Enemy and Brando's Don Corleone. He is obviously performing a role that is ill-fitting, one he needs to grow into or out of. The performer does not seem to know which, and neither do we. The instructions he gives the audience are absurdly autocratic—playful and melodramatic on the one hand, pedantic and random on the other—and serve as a foretaste of what the production will establish as the law of the father. One section of the audience is told to snicker and chatter when it hears the word 'autobiography'; another section is to beg for mercy when the spotlight falls upon it; still another is to shout back the Yiddish phrase 'genug shayn'; and so on. Unfailingly the audience responds with delight as Froot rehearses these bits of call-and-response, raising with every shouted 'genug shayn!' the troubling questions that run through the performance: Why do so many men feel compelled, as Froot's persona does, to prove their manhood through stiff, ill-fitting acts of domination? And why do we, as the audience, love to observe coercive acts and be disciplined in play, if in 'real life' we abhor the idea?

The production explores these questions through a contemporary vaudeville that trades on vaudeville's conventional strengths: shtick, wit, and spritz. Director Dan Hurlin's staging is frequently absurd, as when the performance's most extended monologue—the story of Dehdee Kleinman, the 'Shlammer' or gangster that gives the piece its name—is delivered by Froot as a corpse, his nose pressed against the stage. Most often, the performance seems animated by an almost helpless desire to please and entertain—a desire expressed thematically in Froot's jittery acts of ingratiation onstage, his repeated entreaties and apologies to the audience, and a desire that manifests itself more generally in the mercurial pacing of the production as a whole. Moments of solemnity are punctured by buoyant song-and-dance routines, which are in turn punctured by clownish acts of violence. Entertainment is handmaiden to cruelty: the members of the DeLuxe Vaudeville Trio, for instance, regularly perform klezmer tunes from a miniature stage, and are rewarded for their musical facility and amiability (their theme song is a boisterous "We play bar mitzvahs!") with threats and assaults from the other performers. The vaudevillian ethos, with its variable moods and addresses to the audience, seems a perfect fit for Froot, whose many talents as an actor, dancer, and jazz saxophonist are exploited over the course of the production. This fit gives extra force to the tensions in the piece: it is clear that while Froot's persona is the soul of anxiety—mugging, fretful, out-of-joint—Froot the performer is utterly in his element.

Plot takes a backseat to spectacle in Shlammer, but that is...