all wear bowlers (review)

Two silent-film characters accidentally step off the screen and get stuck in a theatre, where the reality of the situation—they are being watched by an audience—forces them to perform. Part magic show, part surreal journey, part philosophical treatise, all wear bowlers is an existential vaudeville show in which the two characters clown around while waiting for release. It is a divine and highly literate physical comedy, mixing references from Laurel and Hardy, Waiting for Godot, Hamlet, Magritte, and Sartre to comment on the folly of human existence.

The piece begins with a silent film featuring Earnest (Geoff Sobelle) and Wyatt (Trey Lyford), two men in bowler hats who walk toward us down a dusty road. They are lost, and as they try to find their way Earnest falls out of the film into our reality. He has fun jumping back and forth between fictional film and live theatre, and he pulls Wyatt out of the frame to join him. Wyatt finds the courage to invite an audience member back into the film with him, only to discover that she disappears behind the screen—unlike them, she can't appear/doesn't exist as a character in the film. In all wear bowlers theatre emerges as a place more real than film, and Wyatt and Earnest come to life—in the Pirandellian sense—on stage.

But they are not happy about the situation. When the projector overheats and the film melts, Wyatt and Earnest find themselves stuck in front of the audience. They try to escape, but the exits are blocked by a fierce dog, a burglar alarm, and a brick wall; the only way offstage is through the fourth wall. They make their way into the audience (producing tickets to see themselves in their own show) and pull two chairs on stage, where they sit and watch the audience. Nothing happens. "I don't get it," Wyatt says. "It's avant-garde," Earnest quips. Trying to reverse the terms of the performer/spectator relationship doesn't work, so Earnest and Wyatt are forced to perform.

In fact, if the characters Wyatt and Earnest stopped performing they would cease to exist. And as performers they need an audience to confirm their existence. But the violence of the audience's

gaze, along with its insatiable need to be entertained—bright lights pop up and Wyatt feels forced to tap—turn the theatre into a prison or torture chamber. The nightmare of their situation is that they are always in the public eye. When Earnest murders Wyatt, he tries to pretend no one has seen him do it, but he can't—one hundred audience members are staring at him. There is no privacy.

Not only do they need the audience to animate their existence, they also need each other. Earnest abandons Wyatt by sitting in the audience and refusing to budge, so Wyatt has to entertain the audience by himself. This is easily the most painful stretch of the show—for everyone. Wyatt performs a childlike re-enactment of King Kong stomping on an imaginary city, gets bored, makes silly faces that expose his teeth and jaw, prompting the line, "Alas, poor Yorrick," and ends up resorting to fart and poop jokes. He can't make it on his own—like the characters in Huis Clos, like Laurel and Hardy, like Didi and Gogo, Wyatt and Earnest may not enjoy being together, but they need each other.

As soon as Earnest returns, the bright light demands a...