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Text File | 1992-10-19 | 5KB | 109 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 62

Breaking the Jell-O Mold


Blue Man Group is, yes, a group of men who are really blue, and
their bizarre "art playground" is a sensation

By RICHARD ZOGLIN


    The three bullet-headed, blue-colored actors move about
the stage in eerie, wordless unison. They bang away at
kettledrums while squeezing tubes of paint onto the drumheads,
creating volcanic eruptions of color. They stuff handfuls of
Cap'n Crunch cereal into their mouths, then join in a symphony
of amplified chomping. They entice an audience member onstage
for a banquet of Twinkies; suddenly cream filling spurts out of
their chests. By the end of the evening, with strobe lights
flashing and electronic music pulsing, the audience is engulfed
by a tidal wave of crepe paper streaming from the balcony.

    Don't try to understand it. Nothing Blue Man Group does
makes much conventional sense. The troupe's 80-minute theater
piece, called Tubes, is a potpourri of physical stunts, visual
gags, art commentary, audience participation and all-out sensory
assault. In the '60s it might have been called a happening;
today the preferred term is performance art. Whatever, it is the
most talked-about off-Broadway show of the season -- and the
most bracingly original.

    Explaining Blue Man Group is no easy task. Take the Blue
Men themselves. They are expressionless and robotic, yet oddly
childlike and endlessly creative: a tripartite Buster Keaton,
dropped in from Saturn. Some of the bits are overtly satirical
(a dead fish on a canvas is the subject for a high-toned art
critique, which scrolls by on an electronic message board).
Others are raucously playful. One of the Blues tosses what
appears to be marshmallows across the stage to a comrade, who
catches them with his mouth and stuffs them inside like a huge
wad of bubble gum. An audience member is hauled up onstage,
dressed in a white jumpsuit and helmet, and taken backstage,
where a video camera shows him getting suspended by his feet,
splashed with blue paint and bounced against a canvas. He
reappears onstage with his head encased in a mold of orange
Jell-O. (It's a bit of Blue Man trickery: the fellow manhandled
backstage is actually a pretaped double. The Jell-O, however,
is real.)

    "We are trying to create an art playground," says Chris
Wink, one of the three 30-year-old New Yorkers who formed Blue
Man Group in 1988. Their backgrounds are as unexpected as the
show. Wink, who used to write synopses of articles for a
Japanese magazine, dubs himself a "disillusioned futurist." Phil
Stanton was a drummer and an aspiring actor who met Wink when
they worked together for a catering company. Matt Goldman, a
high school friend of Wink's, got an M.B.A. and worked as a
computer-software producer before joining the group.

    They began doing their Blue Man act on the sidewalks of
New York City, once setting up shop opposite the Copacabana
nightclub and enticing the overflow crowd to their own
alternative "Club Nowhere." Later they moved indoors to various
performance spaces in Manhattan. They created Tubes (named for
the industrial tubing that snakes along the theater walls, hangs
from the ceiling and laps up onstage) in early 1991 for the La
MaMa experimental theater, then restaged it at the Astor Place
Theater in November.

    The group is getting offers to take its blue humor
overseas (since most of it is wordless, the language barrier is
minimal). For the time being, though, they have settled in for
what is shaping up as an extended run. "Up until now, we were
always building the props and wrapping the wires right up to the
last minute," says Wink. "This is the first time we've had a
chance to work on our craft."

    It is still a labor-intensive show. The three arrive at
the theater at noon to help prepare the props for the evening
show. A fresh Jell-O mold is delivered every day, and 1,500 ft.
of recycled crepe paper is wound onto rollers for each
performance. The blue makeup takes nearly two hours to apply;
the actors do it themselves. Once the show is over, they hang
around for another couple of hours, helping clean up the nightly
mess.

    The group members wax philosophical about their chosen
color ("Blue has an emotional complexity: a severe quality, but
also a softness"); their alienation from the '80s ("We felt
like outsiders, but we were steeped in the culture"); and their
desire to "blesh" with the audience (the word, a combination of
blend and mesh, comes from Theodore Sturgeon's sci-fi novel More
Than Human). But their show is refreshingly free of
intellectual cant and artistic pretension. One can hunt for
precursors -- the populist subversiveness of Penn and Teller;
the visual inventiveness of Squat Theater -- but the troupe
seems to have sprung, well, out of the blue. "This is a
celebration of the act of creation," says Wink. For the
audience, it's just a celebration.