Review: PFP and REBATEnsemble's NIGHT PARADE Lacks Focus or Intent

Dear Readers, if you've been reading my reviews for a while then you may know of my disdain for performance art. Whether it's naked women being birthed from goo-sacks on stage, random men from the audience beating an actress with pillows, or actors on a seesaw reciting Becket I think it's largely pretentious and wish they would just tell the story already. And yes, I've been subjected to all those things. Luckily Pork Filled Players and REBATEnsemble's Halloween offering "Night Parade" is not completely performance art. Oh, there are some elements in there but that's not all it is. Unfortunately, that also means that the show has a hell of an identity problem as it really doesn't know what it wants to be as it meanders back and forth from performance art to fable to comedy to art lecture to God knows what.

It's all under the guise of an art exhibit for troubled Japanese artist Shunkuno Arashi. As you enter you wander around and take a look at pieces of art that were supposedly made by her. Then we get a lecture on her history which is as entertaining as ... well ... a lecture on art history. But as the story unfolds, several demons invade the lecture and eventually overtake it.

It's a rather short presentation (only about an hour) yet a rather ambitious one as I see what playwright Kendall Uyejiand co-playwright and director Tom Dang were going for. But their approach to it left much to be desired. If you want to go for the spooky aspect of the history then don't take so long getting there and commit to it. Instead, in the midst of the play within the presentation the performers act like they're giving up and mocking their own show making it almost an indictment of the artist and performance art itself. So are we praising the artist or parodying her. Who knows? But since we didn't really get to know her, we don't really care.

Furthermore, the presentation is clunky and sloppy with props falling apart, sliding panels bumping into each other and sliding away to reveal "demons" waiting backstage to go on. Plus, the stylized movement of the demons weren't very scary as they just looked like a bad rip off of a Twin Peaks dream sequence and looked less like a demon at times and more like Bette Davis sashaying in about to proclaim, "What a dump!"

The ensemble of players, Eloisa Cardona, Aimee Decker, Andrew Forrest, Van Pham, Duncan Pound, Season Qiu, Frank Sun, and Buddy Todd each push a little too hard in trying to sell the premise that this is an event gone wrong pushing it into the realm of forced. And the ones within the demon realm could back off from their own self-importance as they came across not as scary but as pretentious and silly. The best thing I can say for the show is that some of the demon costumes from Natalie Shih were cool but even some of them felt out of place. For example, I wasn't sure if the final incarnation of the artist was supposed to be her ghost or Disco Cher.

And the final nail in this "wants to be spooky" coffin was the progressive nature of it all. Be warned that you'll be expected to wander around and stand for the majority of the piece. There are a few short benches but not enough and the audience seemed to race to get to them each time we moved locations. So, for those with mobility issues you may be hurting, something producers of these "immersive" shows never seem to consider. If your audience member is uncomfortable, then they already don't like your show. And so, with my three-letter rating system, I give Pork Filled Players and REBATEnsemble's "Night Parade" a confused NAH. Performance art is bad enough, but performance art muddled together with incoherent storytelling is worse.

"Night Parade" from Pork Filled Players and REBATEnsemble performs through November 3rd. For tickets or information visit them online at www.rebatensemble.org.

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