Photograph courtesy of the Magic Smoking Monkey Theatre
Is it offensive to suggest that the finest actor in the Magic Smoking Monkey Theatre troupe is the trash can assigned to the role of R2-D2 in the group’s One- Hour Star Wars Trilogy Live?
The group is chock-full of gifted comedic actors who make the company’s annual theatrical spoofs a real treat. But the trash can that served as R2-D2 in 2003’s giddy romp through Star Wars Episodes IV –VI —well, he just epitomized grace under pressure in the trash compactor scene, ya know?
MSMT will reprise the smash hit this month (April 23 to May 8, stlshakespeare.org) at the Regional Arts Commission, complete with trash-can R2 and “a Kermit the Frog hand puppet fitted with Yoda ears,” reports company artistic director Donna Northcott. “After all,” she explains, “it’s pretty much the same voice.”
The group has been earning big laughs for more than a decade for presenting dramatic movies as comedic plays, with the scripts shaved down for length, but otherwise unaltered. The ludicrousness of Mark Hamill’s wooden acting, Princess Leia’s feminist theatrics, Darth Vader’s hammy presence, and so on need very little additional campiness to turn the space opera into a National Lampoon–style late-night college comedy.
The One-Hour Star Wars Trilogy Live comes on the heels of last year’s hugely popular One-Hour Lord of the Rings Trilogy Live. “With the Monkey shows, we tend to look for something that has really infiltrated pop culture, that’s familiar to a wide, wide range of the public,” explains Northcott. “And there are a lot of geeks out there, God love ’em.”
