The most unsettling clown I saw this year was not the Joker or Pennywise, but a well-meaning jerk named Nate.
Played by Natalie Palamides in drag, with hair drawn on her exposed chest, Nate rode a small motorcycle onto the Bell House stage in New York City in June, stopping to chug beers, swing an ax, and wrestle and grope audience members — with permission. This was a prelude to the really confrontational part, a solo dramatization of a date, an acrobatic act of puppetry with a mannequin, that ends with a question for the crowd: Was this rape?
“Nate,” a hit at the 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, was a startlingly unusual creation — a clown show about consent that managed to be funny and ferocious, broad and nuanced, a prank on the audience that felt like a tickle. Though the show was recently filmed for a comedy special produced by Amy Poehler, it’s hard to imagine it will capture the daredevil energy in the room. I would have called it singular until last weekend, when I saw Courtney Pauroso’s “Gutterplum,” another anarchic show from Los Angeles, which was filled with spilled fluids and elegantly crass physical humor.
Pauroso and Palamides share a director (Phil Burgers, who goes by the name Dr. Brown) and a certain raucous aesthetic that proves that modern clowning can be not only scary and funny, but also disarmingly sexual. Call them carnal clowns.
“Gutterplum,” which runs for two more performances Saturday at Union Hall in Brooklyn, can seem like a companion piece to “Nate,” which sends up unhinged femininity instead of toxic masculinity. This show has a linear narrative that follows the sweep of the life of one woman, Dale Ravioli, from childhood to old age. But the story is not what you are going to be talking about afterward. It’s the aggressively bizarre collection of moments, the flights of ridiculousness that you can’t believe you are seeing.
In no other show this year will you see an elderly character wearing a wig of pubic hair at her crotch while playing air guitar or a younger one spider-walking topless while growling demonically. Did I mention this freakout of a performance also happens to be a tender romance?
Early on in “Gutterplum,” whose title is never explained, Pauroso invites a man from the audience to play kick the can. This begins a series of vignettes tracing a relationship and the awakening of a sexual life in a few inventive gestures. There’s a scene portraying puberty that resembles nothing so much as the transformation of a person into a werewolf, but the monster this time is a party girl who parrots sentences like “I actually like the taste of beer” and “Don’t tell my dad.”
And yet, Pauroso doesn’t sneer at its central character. The comedy comes from the juxtaposition of the outrageous and vulgar physicality with jarring notes of sentimentality. After doing a strip tease, which skewers objectification while taking part in it, Pauroso sings a heartfelt ballad.
At the start of the show, she picks up a blue exercise ball and gently tosses it into the audience; after encouraging a patron to throw it back, it hits her in the face, catapulting her backward. She plays this game again with similar results. But the third time the audience member tosses it back, her blank-eyed innocence falls and she grabs it, fakes throwing it back and says pointedly: “You think I can’t catch a ball?”
Over the next hour, Ravioli loses her virginity, falls in love, has an abortion, grows old, suffers loss and faces death. But the structure of the episodes follows the same pattern as that game of catch, inviting the audience to play, then shocking us with a trick. While she is always a step ahead, Pauroso pretends otherwise. Both she and Palamides are smart acts working hard to appear stupid.
The same week that “Gutterplum” had its New York premiere, Zach Zucker, another young Los Angeles modern clown, put on his own pratfalling, beer-swilling clown performance in the character of Jack Tucker, the world’s worst stand-up. Pumping his fists in the air, he strutted onstage, his fly undone, falling on his face, assisted by an intricate sound design that jacked up the energy. He is a familiar type: The comic with infinite confidence and no skill.
These are all shows about fools out of their depth. While Zucker and Pauroso essentially create character sketches, Palamides, who has a background in theater — first performing the character of Nate with the superb Philadelphia experimental troupe Pig Iron — builds a more layered world around her buffoons, her comic bits pushing the action not toward a point so much as a thorny question.
In “Nate,” she opens up a conversation about sexual assault in the #MeToo era, broaching the issue directly but also through the form of interactive theater itself.
Every time a clown asks you to sniff the flower in his lapel then squirts water in your face, the laugh rests on a minor humiliation. Comedy often depends on ethically slippery manipulation, misleading setups and disorienting punch lines. Palamides makes the coercion in audience participation more explicit, forcing some uncomfortable questions.
Along with “Nate” this summer, she presented another solo show, “Laid,” which began with her hatching out of a giant foam egg, only to then pull an egg out of her dress, crack it open and then, with a hot plate nearby, face a decision: Should I eat or raise it?
Over and over, she replays this scene, sometimes emphasizing absurdity, other times pathos. It’s a show about the anxiety of parenthood in which a fragile woman gets a huge amount of egg on her face. But it’s also about a mother murdering her children. Keeping both options alive and telegraphed to the audience with a minimum of language is a hell of a juggling act.
While these shows deal with dark subject matter, they somehow maintain a sunny optimism, perhaps a response to the stereotype of the sad clown, but just as likely, a reflection of personal taste.
The new vaudevillians, like Bill Irwin and David Shiner who emerged in the 1980s and ’90s, aimed to reinvigorate clowning by deconstructing or winking at classic tropes. These young performers seem less tethered to the legacy of bowler hats and giant shoes.
As artists searching for originality often are, they borrow from a variety of sources, including burlesque, circus, experimental theater and stand-up. And perhaps what makes them seem so thrillingly unpredictable is that they don’t seem to be reacting against a tradition as struggling to forge their own.
This article originally appeared in
.