C.I.C.T. / Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord

MARCEL

Created by and Featuring Jos Houben and Marcello Magni

Coproduction TANDEM – Scène Nationale

U.S. PREMIERE

From Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, the Parisian home of Peter Brook, comes a poignant two-hander about the collision of clowning and mortality. Jos Houben and Marcello Magni, who starred in Samuel Beckett’s Fragments at TFANA, are comic masters and original members of the famed Complicité. In Marcel, which they co-created, they play an aging physical comedian and an inscrutable, clipboard-wielding nemesis mysteriously enjoined to test him with a battery of absurd tasks. Slapstick meets the limits of age and “all ages laugh and recognize their own absurdity in the comic antics.” – The Guardian

THE ART OF LAUGHTER

Created by and Featuring Jos Houben

Production: C.I.C.T. / Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord and Compagnie Rima

A comedy about comedy about what makes audiences laugh. Performing in English, Jos Houben dissects everyday life – a baby’s first steps, a man falling in a restaurant, the essence of various cheeses – revealing why laughter is at the core of our humanity. The Guardian calls it a show about “how a body can make people laugh.”

Normally, if someone tries to explain a joke, it’s not as funny. But the dissection of a pratfall happens to be even funnier than the actual act in the hands of Jos Houben who, along with fellow physical theatre artist, Marcello Magni, present a pair of one-act plays, Marcel and The Art of Laughter, at Theatre for a New Audience at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center. The two are quite charming and playful, not quite buffoonish nor straight performers. They exist somewhere in between; something like a professor crossed with a clown. In Marcel, a hapless Magni meets a demanding Houben, who orders a series of ridiculous “warm-ups,” which he jots down on a clipboard. What follows is Magni performing a variety of exercises involving a particularly Escheresque set piece (scenic design by Oria Puppo). It’s pretty silly and slapstick, particularly with a joke involving a bottle of water, but becomes rather poignant when Magni slips from English into an animated Italian (his mother tongue) to talk about his boyhood. A moon drops down from the rafters and “Clair de Lune” plays. A delighted Magni reaches out to grasp it, then he plays with it, pretending it’s a boat or a hat. It’s a moving tribu …Read more