Word: ox
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...like a cross between Walter Cronkite and Big Brother, that directs the taming of the wilderness. His minions include a creatively frustrated egghead, a hot-tempered muscleman, a pair of winsome young lovers and all manner of ax-swinging loggers and their "wimmin." Inexplicably absent is Babe the Blue Ox...
Bunyan, once the greatest logger of them all, and his emotionally delicate cobalt-blue ox, Babe, have fled from the industrialization of logging in the Northwest to the California redwoods. Swathed in fringed and beaded leather, his beard tied with a thong and the ensemble topped with a fur hat, he resembles a strange kind of bear. His hilarious bouts of self-pity and childishness make Bunyan the perfect counterpart to his more serious companions...
Timelessness is a hallmark of Bryars' work. He first explored it as one of the composers for director Robert Wilson's epic the CIVIL warS, a multiact theater piece that has yet to be performed in its entirety. He is currently working on his first full-fledged opera, Dr. Ox's Experiment, based on an obscure Jules Verne novel about a stranger who arrives in a village where time moves infinitely slowly and who disrupts everyone's life by bringing them back to "normal." In The Sinking of the Titanic he has created a modern fantasia on a hymn tune...
Marilyn Sokol (Gittel, Sender Shlamazel, Yenta Pesha) is a performing genious as far as bawdy presentational exhibition is concerned, and Charles Levin (Gronam Ox) knows how to sing and strut mock arrogance and hammed idiocy as well as anyone. Remo Airaldi, with a stout frame assisting, caricatures overweight kids and clever petty thieves with equal virtuosity. So why are they only supporting performers...
They mask and they are loud, never sentimental and wimpy. They command their characters and the stage with farcial abandon. Yenta Pesha (Sokol) throws giant plastic pickles at her husband, Gronam Ox (Levin), whenever be does something stupid. She wags her tongue, spits and gags attempting some of the more delicate words of the Yiddish language, and her flexible face will always tell you what she's (not) thinking even if her words do not. In other words, she knows how to put on a show; it has little to do with drama, at least the type proffered...