Word: potluckers
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...feast spread by director Douglas G. Fitch '81-'82 in his new production, Potluck Supper, is so rich in dramatic delicacies that it satisfies even the most discriminating palate. So it is with a burp and a goblet raised in toast that we hail the most inspired piece of dramatic lunacy in recent memory--a performance art extravaganza that should not be missed...
...Potluck Supper literally takes place in the mind of its lead character, the neurotic host (David Prum) whose anxiety about preparing for a dinner party provides the backdrop of this cosmic comedy of manners. In the first scene, Prum stands center stage with his head inside a miniature version of his living room, nervously shooting the breeze but getting tripped up by his moribund sense of humor. You know the scene: you're standing at the potato dip and the only small-talk subjects that come to mind have to do with dead cats and getting your stomach pumped...
They are also a literary critic's intellectual wet dream. Potluck is comprised of stages--as Fitch told The Crimson, "The protagonist creates a city in his mind, destroys it, is eaten by a tiger, swims around in an ocean that soon becomes a desert, and then winds up back in his living room"--that completes a cycle. Like a Biblical parable, it tells of the destruction of civilization at the hands of hubristic pseudo-intellectuals. The punishment: society is destroyed like the Tower of Babel and sunk into the ocean like Atlantis...
...thematically, the most interesting aspect of Potluck is how it works as an investigation of psyche. It is a deconstructed drama that constructs itself before the audience, employing the host's neuroses as a mirror for a fretful director who worries about how his work will be received. As Prum tells the audience after one particularly trying episode (in which a gigantic and incredibly spooky inflatable Deity fills the stage), "It would be better if I was a book. . . [a book] would be very clear." Instead, Potluck represents the graphic adventures of a rampaging Id--that of director/author Fitch...
Best of all, however, Potluck never tries to pass off its apocalyptic weltanshauung as anything more than good fun. The dire message is there for those hungry enough to find it, but the operative word is zany--thus the title song about the supper that features as its chorus the line, "You could bring tuna casserole or even Jello...