There are certain performance elements that I'm just primed to appreciate, perhaps to the point of bias — though I acknowledge this readily. When I come out of a show featuring puppetry, for example, I always end up mentioning it; this is mostly owing to the fact that one of my college professors is a puppeteer and puppetry scholar, so I studied the form more than I might have at another school. It's become a bit of a joke for my most frequent theatre plus-one, my boyfriend Ben: "What did you like about the play? Other than the puppets."
Lately, clowning has called to me in much the same way puppetry does. If I know it's coming, I know I'll probably have a good time; if I'm surprised, I'll probably be enthralled. Like puppetry, there's something about the physicality of clowning that can cut through the noise of a text, that can help a writer or performer get out of their own heads. If done well, I think, these forms can bring the audience out of our own heads too, forcing us to be more present in the moment in front of us.
This state of demanding awareness is heightened in A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First, running through Feb. 22 at SoHo Playhouse. (Coincidentally, this is also where I saw clown Julia Masli's show ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.) Audience members are encouraged to sit onstage, where Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland (who also wrote the piece) nearly roll, hop, and stumble into the folding chairs. They make it look easy to flip a large tire, and when they aren't leapfrogging over each other's backs, they're huffing full Beatles tunes on harmonicas. To say the obvious, they get a hell of a workout.
As scouts at summer camp pretending to be soldiers in Vietnam — or perhaps as soldiers imagining sunnier days back at camp — tough-talking Ace (Roland) imparts wisdom to Grasshopper (Rice), a slightly more skittish scout who isn't sure he's got this whole being-a-boy thing down — so how can he ever be a man? Ace has multiple brothers, some of whom even deployed to Vietnam, so he's confident he can teach Grasshopper how to swim and spit like a proper American son. Both boys are unwavering in their love of LBJ, who's not just the president but camp counselor, father figure, and comic book hero rolled into one. What Ace really wants, other than his father's approval, is for President Johnson to know his name.
The mud-encased clowns bounce from camp bunks to army barracks to the land of a mysterious folktale to the hot, unforgiving jungle in the space of an hour. Rice and Roland both grew up in military families, possibly moving from place to place in their childhoods as much as their characters do onstage, with LBJ as the North Star. Though the boyish adventures in Vietnam inevitably lead to the hell of war, there is no monologue decrying Johnson or his decision to keep shipping barely-legal soldiers out to slaughter. It would be too cliché to have Ace rant against the war machine while perched atop the tire; instead, he maintains his convictions until the bitter end, adhering not just to his belief in LBJ but also to his own sense of masculine American duty. The audience doesn't need the players to preach about the perils of war or the unfairness of conscription — instead, Rice and Roland trust that we are smart enough to figure it out on our own.
Trust in your audience is another aspect of theatre that I covet and that I believe has become all the more rare since 2016; theatre of the first Trump administration was, to be frank, full of pandering, excessive explication, and the tendency to shout that what was happening was wrong and that it had never been so wrong before! I don't go to the theatre simply to be told these things — I want to feel something. If America's going to be run by clowns, can it please be Rice and Roland?
At SoHo Playhouse through Feb. 22. Run time: 70 mins. Tickets: $40 plus fees. Lighting design and production management by Angelo Sagnelli.