Whipped Cream - Oh Fuck!

As part of Portland’s Fertile Ground Festival this year, I got to see a double-billing of two new plays – Kate Horn’s Whipped Cream and Freudian Dreams and Sam Dinkowitz and Chris Beatty’s Oh Fuck! Oh Shit! It’s Love! The Musical at Hipbone Studio on Burnside. A grossly uneven pairing, it did illustrate two points my friend Amy Jensen made on her blog: double bills like this are really only done in festivals, and “invites the audience to be curious and interested what has been put together.” And really, Fertile Ground’s curators did a nice job pairing these two plays – they both entail explorations of relationships amongst the 20s and 30s crowd. Oh Fuck!  provided a poignantly funny journey through one couple’s relationship arch, beautifully executed by a strong cast. Whipped Cream, on the other hand, didn’t.

Whipped Cream and Freudian Dreams

Have you ever sat in a coffee shop and pretended to work on your novel about a well-dressed Northwesterner who solves vampire and werewolf related crimes with his Apple computer and six-pack of PBR, but really you were watching and judging the other café patrons and feeling secretly superior?

PBR - the hipster's spinach.

Kate Horn sure has (except for the novel plot – that’s my idea), and, like a modern day Sigmund Freud or Jane Goodall, she’s communicated her findings to us in dramatic form (using Freud and Goodall as characters, no less). The result reads like a thought popped into her head one day at the café and she promptly wrote a play about it, featuring an analysis by Freud of the way boys flirt with baristas. If that seems like a limited and contrived idea for a play, that’s because it is. It was cute for the first five minutes, but by then I was used to the gimmick and bored. Even when Horn tried to spice things up by bringing Goodall on stage to analyze the characters, it was all still the same schtick, just with a different vocabulary.

But it would be unfair to say that Whipped Cream only had one level, or that Horn can only do one thing. During the first nine minutes of the ten minute play, the psychoanalyst was the only one who broke the fourth wall, and he did it gently, always in the analytic third person, never addressing the audience directly. But Horn finished her play, quite jarringly, by having her baristas directly address the audience and telling us that we could take our chuckles and $12 tickets and shove them up our voyeuristic asses.

Oh Fuck! Oh Shit! It’s Love! The Musical

A product of Milepost 5 in the heart of Portland’s sordid Jade District, Oh Fuck! seems to think itself alarmingly randy. So I went expecting dildos and Vaseline, and instead got roses, doves and a charmingly poignant yet funny story of one couple’s journey in and out of love.

Sorry. None of these.

I got to see an earlier incarnation of Oh Fuck! at Milepost 5 this fall, which was only their key “falling in love” scene as part of a variety show of other work coming out of their artists’ commune. So it was fun for me to get to see a full-length development of the piece.

This incarnation was just a reading, so it was pretty rough around the edges. It also started slow. Dinkowitz seems to think he needs a prologue with the two main characters, Tim and Molly (Phillip J. Berns and Jessica Anselmo), writing in their diaries about how they feel about their upcoming first date. What Dinkowitz doesn’t realize is that this show absolutely rides on the chemistry between the performers. Tim and Molly’s relationship arch is adorable and rings true in a way that makes me joyful of the fun that I’ve had falling in love, and sad about the, well, sadness that I’ve had falling out of it. This magic isn’t limited to Berns and Anselmo’s chemistry together. The rest of the cast and pit are equally responsible for this show’s success. Juliana Wheeler and Orion Bradshaw are side-splitters as the main couple’s foils. Wheeler plays the sad sad ditzy cokehead Ashleigh, and Bradshaw is endearingly aggravating as the meathead Brad. Their interactions with each other, as well as with Berns and Anselmo, kept the audience hunched forward in laughter. But it wasn’t cheap laughs, like what I felt Horn was going for. Instead the humor came from the very real situations and the actors’ absolute investment in them, just as it should. The actors’ chemistry and the urgency of the story they found themselves in actually overflowed the stage, incorporating the musicians into their struggle to negotiate the rocky shores of love.

Happy Valentine's Day everybody!

Oh, it was a musical by the way. While most of Chris Beatty’s songs were still too rough to really tell anything about, I was impressed by the “Pre-Coitus Song” with its fusion of hip-hop and slow love ballad, and with the “Break-Up Song,” with its angsty minor tonality.

So, double bills. Just like Amy says, their still done but usually only in the festival setting. But what Amy doesn’t say is that an uneven bill like Whipped Cream and Freudian Dreams – Oh Fuck! Oh Shit! It’s Love! The Musical can either be remarkably unfair to the weaker piece (if Whipped Cream had gone second) or make up for a subpar and mean-spirited first piece with a truly inspired and moving second piece (like they did – good call Fertile Ground curators!)