Review: Fatboy/A Red Orchid Theatre

It’s one thing to be pissed, but the grotesque vaudeville that is John Clancy’s finger-wagging, America-bashing comedy (in a production at A Red Orchid Theatre) is the intellectual equivalent of slinging animal dung across the stage.  Everyone’s entitled to a tantrum now and then—even playwrights; or perhaps especially playwrights—and I certainly dig Clancy’s remarkably profane verbosity; the script reads like a longshoreman’s guide to insults.  And it’s not that I disagree with the play’s larger point.  But man, does Clancy take his time getting there—and when he finally does, he hammers that sucker like a man paid by the swing.  Guy Van Swearingen’s more-is-more direction doesn’t seem to be doing the play any favors, but it is certainly audacious.  Fatboy, in the world of Clancy’s agitprop, is a stand-in for America—a bloated, murdering pig who takes what he wants and wants what he takes.  He is “South Park”’s Cartman all grown up; a bloated, misanthropic, foul-mouthed Dickinson villain on steroids.  It’s a compelling characterization, but as politically minded theater the play is shooting blanks.  The metaphor and all its encompassing ideas are shoved down your throat in a fit of playwright outrage.  Clancy doesn’t want you to think; he wants you to agree or get the fuck out.  That being said, I kind of like what Steve Pickering has done with Fatboy—it’s as if he’s a bully trapped in one of those plastic sumo-wrestler thingies.  Jennifer Engstrom, as his nympho wife, Queen Fudgie, is a marvelous-ugly cartoon brought to life—equal parts Carol Channing and Carol Burnett’s charwoman, with a dash of that supreme prehensile tackiness represented in all its glory on “The Real Housewives of Orange County.”  If that ain’t American, I don’t know what is.  (Nina Metz)

At A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N Wells, (312)943-8722. This production is now closed.