Shows: Mainstage
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"GET YOUR WAR ON"
By Eric Grode
The New York Sun
January 12, 2007
Brace yourself for the unfiltered rage that fuels "Get Your War On," a popular Internet cartoon receiving a raucous and quite funny adaptation by the Austin, Texas-based theater company Rude Mechanicals.
David Rees's cartoon typically makes "The Daily Show" look as earnest and unquestioning as an Up With People concert. A group of office drones chat on the phone or over doughnuts ( Mr. Rees derives his images almost entirely from pre-existing pieces of clip art), giving vent to wildly profane screeds against the John Ashcrofts and Donald Rumsfelds of the world: "When Kissinger signs a U.S. government paycheck, does he use a ballpoint pen or the bloody, severed limb of an East Timorese child?" (Assume that any lines quoted herein have had several expletives deleted.)
Rude Mechs, as the company is known, pulls no punches with its delivery of this incendiary material, delivered in chronological order from the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to last month's hanging of Saddam Hussein. Rather than work too closely at replicating Mr. Rees's somewhat limited repertoire of visuals, the talented quintet of actors (including Jason Liebrecht and the divine Lana Lesley) augment their droll line readings by manipulating five old-fashioned overhead projectors that sit side by side on a long table. Director Shawn Sides choreographs the interplay among the projected images — important dates, bits of clip art, silly graphics — with a giddy precision that would make Busby Berkeley proud. This frenetic, faux-primitive approach is both a plausible equivalent to and a sly continuation of Mr. Rees's clenched-jaw minimalism.
The odds are slim that many conservatives will opt to spend an evening watching actors dress up as Terri Schiavo's feeding tube or express disingenuous shock that Rumsfeld is (or was) actually paid a salary for his efforts. Still, several of the jokes are clever enough to transcend party affiliation — "Just wait until 12 years from now, when Jenna Bush defeats Osama bin Laden for her dad" — and the sheer overall gutsiness of "Get Your War On" is a bracing reminder of just how toothless and timid political humor has become.
"Hello, is this History?" one dispirited citizen asks into his ubiquitous phone. "You are gonna judge these people, right?" Mr. Rees and Rude Mechs have beaten history to the punch, passing a brutally partisan — and brutally funny — judgment of their own.