Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Kate Tarker’s word-drunk satire THUNDERBODIES gets its point across by flailing and rampaging, unstintingly

• By drediman
• November 5, 2018
• No Comments

Juan Carlos Hernandez, Deirdre O’Connell, and Monique St. Cyr in Soho Rep’s production of Kate Tarker’s “Thunderbodies”. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

This weekend, I caught Kate Tarker’s hallucinatory new play Thunderbodies at Soho Rep. The play is set in some sort of vague alternate reality – the U.S. has just ended a war with an unspecified country. A lone soldier decides he’d rather stay in the foreign war zone and continue to combat the enemy. Meanwhile, his mother back at home is hoping to tie the knot with a decorated military general. But before she can do so, the President demands and insists that her son must first be brought back home …

If the premise seems a bit random, that’s because it kind of actually is. But the thin plot isn’t the play’s raison d’être. Thunderbodies is all about the outrageous tone it conveys – it’s a timely, word-drunk satire gone wild. By indulging in extreme, rampaging verbal diarrhea, the play suggests a topsy-turvy world devoid of sense and morality, which I think many of us can relate to. The play is far from a masterpiece and its gratuitous, if flailing, vulgarity may not be to everyone’s taste, but I found the work’s crass extremities to be a sobering slap to the face. Indeed, to a certain to degree, the world presented to us in the play shares the same inherent characteristics as our own. That’s a scary thought.

As typical of Soho Rep productions, the piece has been mounted by talented, up-and-coming director Lileana Blain-Cruz with visionary theatrical boldness. Her cast, particularly the fierce Deirdre O’Connell – one of the most fearless actresses currently working in the Off-Broadway circuit – throw themselves into Ms. Tarker’s uncompromising, albeit vaudevillian, universe with unstinting commitment. They each give gutsy, quite in-your-face-performances that are unafraid to be larger than larger-than-life. The overall effect is unnerving, particularly within the claustrophobic confines of Soho Rep’s intimate space.

RECOMMENDED

THUNDERBODIES
Off-Broadway, Play
Soho Repertory Theatre (Soho Rep)
1 hour, 30 minutes (without an intermission)
Through November 18