Hungry, Lost, and Surrounded by Enemies: A Review of HATE/LAB’s Animal Play
As the audience trickles into Palmer Square Park for HATE/LAB’s new show, “Animal Play,” actor and co-writer Jake Flum greets a friendly face in the audience. As Jake leaves to get ready for the performance, his friend exclaims, "Thank you for making live theatre!" Jake grins and shrugs back, "Literally all I know what to do!"
"Animal Play" is HATE/LAB's newest play, developed by Steak Richardson and Jake Flum during quarantine. If theatre-making is the process of manifesting reality out of nothing, then Jake’s throwaway joke could be said to be a major thread throughout their production. The story centers on Tootsie (Steak Richardson) and Roscoe (Jake Flum), two men who find themselves alone in an empty wilderness. They know little about their situation other than they're "hungry, lost, and—*gulp*—surrounded by enemies." By backtracking through their shared memories, they rediscover how they came to be there and the adventure they’ve been undertaking.
Steak Richardson's Tootsie is a banjo-playing wiseguy out of Hanna-Barbera. With pointer finger held out in a perpetually professorial stance, he spearheads the search for meaning, shaking his booty on key words and making eyes with the audience. When he gulps in fear, it's practically verbalized. Jake Flum's Roscoe is a more naturalistic foil to Tootsie, as a cheerful, forgetful, and adorable innocent. Their dynamic as a vaudevillian duo is wildly entertaining to watch as one struggles to outplay the other throughout.
While the basic setup of two men stranded in an absurdist void certainly evokes Beckett as an apparent influence, the focus on dominance and questioning of reality more closely evokes 2019's 'The Lighthouse." Roscoe can't recall anything about how they arrived here, so Tootsie takes charge of the script's exposition. In Steak Richardson's portrayal, Tootsie relishes in exposition as a form of control, played as if he's writing the script as it goes along. When he claims Roscoe's nickname in the army was 'Monkey Boy,’ for instance, we're left wondering if this is actually true or a joke played at Roscoe's expense.
The script is not explicit about this metatheatrical bent— it's all played relatively straight—but the disagreements over past action, questioning of the (non-)existence of specific props, and Tootsie's mischievous audience asides as he reveals information all contribute to this uncertain atmosphere. It all begins to feel like Tootsie's world, wherein he gets to be playwright, director, and chief actor. In this space, theatre is all he knows what to do. Contributing further to this idea is how the staging is restricted to the circle created by the audience. Only one significant moment in the script is reserved for taking advantage of the park's expanse. While it usually feels like a missed opportunity when outdoor shows don't take advantage of such space, the directorial choice to restrict the action to a tight circle emphasizes Tootsie's need for control.
Considering Steak and Jake developed the script in May during lockdown, I feel grateful they have waited for this time when they could perform "Animal Play" to a live audience. Tootsie and Roscoe's antics creating stories out of nothing in front of their surrounding audience—"surrounded by enemies"—are too deeply embedded in the script's DNA to be relegated to Zoom. In the absence of readily available meaning, the need to create something out of nothing is literally all we need to know what to do.
While HATE/LAB’s Sept-Oct run of “Animal Play” has currently ended, you can follow them on Facebook to stay up to date on new content here.