THEATER REVIEW; The Courage To Accept That Life Is a Cheese Ball By BEN BRANTLEY Published: March 28, 2001, Wednesday
Isn't it wonderful what a nimble set of hands can do with a simple cheese ball? And no, the hands do not belong to the hyperinventive Martha Stewart but to the wholesomely perverse brother-and-sister team of David and Amy Sedaris.
Two of the freshest satirists working today, the Sedarises have their own special gifts for reassembling leftovers. Take that cheese ball, for instance. It's the spherical center of ''The Book of Liz,'' the Sedarises' delightfully off-key, off-color hymn to clichés we all live by, whether we know it or not.
This basic orb-shaped hors d'oeuvre not only serves as the taking-off point for the plot, which is about a runaway from an Amish-like religious sect called the Squeamish. It also provides the essential conflict among the main characters, a convex mirror in which they can examine their souls, the answer to a perplexing mystery and a whole slew of gloriously bad metaphors.
Here, for example, is the title character, Sister Elizabeth Donderstock (played by Ms. Sedaris), in a philosophical mood: ''Stick a moon in the sky, put a nice smoky cheese ball on the table, and people will know when it's waning. But that's not always true of a person, is it?''
Now how far, honestly, is this tone of voice from many of the novels recommended on the Oprah show? The Sedarises are an essential corrective to the gospel of self-esteem. Now hovering on the edge of middle age, they have somehow managed to grow up in the era of laugh tracks, theme parks, self-help books and endless reruns without turning into either human Care Bears or way-cool disciples of disaffection.
As their latest offering, now at the Greenwich House Theater, reminds us, they are invaluable guides to a synthetic, self-recycling world. Mr. Sedaris, the essayist and public radio commentator, and Ms. Sedaris, an actress best known for ''Strangers With Candy'' on television, share an appalled and amused eye for the grotesque in popular culture.
They have collaborated to memorably corrosive effect in earlier plays like ''Stitches'' (in which a disfigured girl becomes a trend-setting supermodel) and ''One Woman Shoe'' (in which the welfare program is restructured as a talent contest). Now there is ''The Book of Liz,'' which considers, among other things, the American love for Americana, 12-step programs and spiritualism, as well as alternative medicine, gay waiters and, oh yes, the problems of excessive sweating.
''Liz,'' the Sedarises' first production for the Drama Dept., is their most civilized effort. The usual gross-out jokes are kept to a minimum, and the evening is without the endearing rough edges that made their previous shows feel like the work of stoned teenagers playing dress-up in the garage.
Directed by Hugh Hamrick, who also designed the drolly picturesque sets, and enacted by a priceless quartet of quick-sketch caricaturists, the production flows with polished professionalism through 75 intermissionless minutes. But the Sedarises have definitely not been made over into sanitized smoothness. A skewering wit keeps pricking through the surface, like a furtively held hypodermic needle. Before you know it, blood has been drawn.
This is evident from the opening moment, when the kneeling Reverend Tollhouse (Chuck Coggins), head of the Squeamish Community, begs God ''to accept the following compliments on my behalf.'' Now isn't that as nifty a description of prayer as you've ever heard? Even better is Tollhouse's explanation for the Shaker-like austerity of his sect: ''You have a good eye and thus, so shall we.''
That's the Sedaris style: tweaking the familiar until it warps. Ms. Sedaris, for example, seems to be sweating nervously when she appears, a common occurrence among actors and one we traditionally pretend to ignore. But then she just keeps getting wetter, until she is cascading water. Finally, Liz explains that she has always ''perspired like a stallion.''
Heavy perspiration, it turns out, is a virtue in Sister Elizabeth, who makes the popular cheese balls sold by the Squeamish. But before she learns to accept herself, she must flee her home, where life is lived as it was in the pre-Industrial Age, and take a journey through the Oz-like world outside.
There she undergoes a series of adventures amid Ukrainian refugees with cockney accents and recovering alcoholics. She also finds employment in a Pilgrim-themed restaurant, which features menu items like the ''We Hate the English Muffin'' and ''Willamsburgers'' and where her Squeamish attire fits right in. (Victoria Farrell's costumes match the script's flair for bringing out the cartoonishness in the ordinary.)
All sorts of language -- as ludicrously artificial as the set's painted scrims -- is inflated and punctured, whether it's the hysterical monologues of old movie soap operas, the tourist-trap quaintness of Squeamish speech or the fascist uplift of 12-step jargon.
This allows the characters to talk in a gleeful assortment of pastiches. ''Oh, Reverend, I've no temperament for chiving,'' for example, or: ''What is it, old friend, that I had to dress like a peanut in order to feel like a human again?''
The ensemble members, rounded out by David Rakoff and Jackie Hoffman, switch with pitch-perfect tone from grave ''Crucible''-style speech as the Squeamish to the perky self-centeredness of the assorted 12-steppers. They all have that golden comic instinct, associated with improv, for using one or two exaggerated traits to evoke an entire personality.
As Liz, Ms. Sedaris expertly employs her natural overbite and slumped shoulders to suggest both passive dejection and spunky defiance. Even disguised as a top-hatted peanut, her posture is eloquent with Liz's ambivalence.
There is also, of course, her poetic use of perspiration. Which sort of sums up the Sedarises, who process the soppy, whether it's physical or cultural, into something as dry as gunpowder.
THE BOOK OF LIZ
By the Talent Family, David and Amy Sedaris; directed by Hugh Hamrick; sets by Mr. Hamrick; costumes by Victoria Farrell; lighting by Kirk Bookman; sound by Laura Grace Brown; hair design by Steven ''Perfidia'' Kirkham; composer, Mark Levenson; production manager, Christian Douglas Cargill; stage manager, Jennifer Rae Moore. Presented by the Drama Dept. At the Greenwich House Theater, 27 Barrow Street, Greenwich Village.
WITH: Amy Sedaris (Sister Elizabeth Donderstock and Brother Hesikiah), David Rakoff (Brother Nathaniel Brightbee, Yvon, Donny Polk and Rudy Bruton), Chuck Coggins (Reverend Tollhouse, Visil and Duncan Trask) and Jackie Hoffman (Sister Constance Butterworth, Oxana, Cecily Cole, Sophisticated Visitor, Dr. Barb Ginley and Ms. Yolanda Foxley).
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