The first annual Exponential Fest, created as Brooklyn’s reaction to the host of mid-winter theater fests in the city, pulls no punches. In Biter (Every Time I Turn Around), remounted for the Festival after last year’s run, theater collective Title:Point conjures up a universe in which no one is safe, and nothing is sacred. A universe where the Punky Brewster theme song plays on repeat, mailmen wear booty shorts, fish have speech impediments and birthday parties turn deadly.
Biter is billed as a horror comedy, a self-professed “slapstick gore-fest,” and it does not disappoint. Leaving the play, I was struck by what the two seemingly disparate genres have in common—they both elicit extreme physical responses, and Biter is a physical experience, without a doubt. I spent most of the play’s running time laughing, wincing, recoiling or some combination thereof. At one point, my eyes filled with tears, and I can’t be quite sure which of the two genres to blame for that response.
The one act took place in what I would best describe as a shed, behind the Bushwick venue the Silent Barn. Roughly four rows of compact seating accommodated an audience of no more than 40, and thanks to my brave theater-going partner, I ended up sitting right in the front, in the proverbial splash zone, the actors no more than a foot or two away. Sitting in the front row pushed this performance beyond the bounds of theater and into what might be considered performance art.
The play is co-written by Spencer Thomas Campbell and Ryan William Downey, the latter playing the partner to Catrin Lloyd-Bollard as a black and white clad duo reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy crossed with Waiting For Godot’s Didi and Gogo. Haughty Downey jabs at the childlike Lloyd-Bollard (“talking to you is a form of assisted suicide”), and they engage in lightning-fast, hilarious repartee that involves a hearty amount of wordplay, from a repeated gag about metaphors (“meta for what?”) to circuitous, vaguely metaphysical reasoning (“the best part about not having money it that there always isn’t more where it didn’t come from”). But despite occasionally finding themselves at odds, they’re a dynamic pair, yoked together in some sort of purgatory.
That’s just one piece of this confounding, astounding puzzle. Black and white checks cover the back wall, and black dots project over them, an eerie addition on top of their black lips and white face powder. But our pair remains unphased, and they set out to throw a birthday party for the “birthday bear,” a boy in a bear onesie and whirligig hat (played with unbridled physicality by Justin Anselmi) whose cuteness belies a homicidal lunacy.
Suddenly, the play finds a new inspiration, a la Silence of the Lambs. The evening’s hosts offer the birthday bear Hostess snacks, dead fish, and a live fish, played by Spencer Thomas Campbell, who just can’t seem to remember the punchline of his joke. They ultimately fail to keep him placated, which necessitates the arrival of the International Detective and the reappearance of the postman with a bleeding eye wound. Oh, then cue the Zapruder film.
Title:Point’s Biter (Every Time I Turn Around) is sweaty, delirious, hilarious, horrifying and putrid -- literally, the raw, dead fish was half crushed within arms length of me -- and it was one of the most unforgettable pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen.
