Life is a carnival

Café Mimosa is delightfully absurd

by Bill Rodriguez

EXCHANGE AT THECAFÉ MIMOSA. By Oana Maria Cajal. Directed by Mark J. Lerman. With Neil G. Santoro, Constance Crawford, Paul Hoover, Margaret Melozzi, Casey Seymour Krim. At Perishable Theatre through March 25.

Thank goodness and cream pies that all theater doesn't have to be Strindberg. There's lots of room for inspired silliness, and Perishable Theatre has made way for plenty in the form of Exchange at the Café Mimosa, by Oana Maria Cajal.

There's no whipped cream flying -- everything but. Lizards in various sizes and amorous inclinations keep popping up like the da-da-da-dum motif in Beethoven's fifth, and the populous and antic cast rarely have their feet on the ground for long. It's all fun and fluffery, and the payoff is the entertaining process itself rather than the summary attempt at sense at the end.

But plot we got, a quasi-espionage mystery with two paper-wrapped boxes as the McGuffin. It's the eventual exchange of these boxes, as arbitrary an aim as any, that propels the story and keeps its absurd edge well honed.

The short scenes come at us cinematically, an effect amplified by the clever set design of Jeremy Woodward. Stage front is a thin red walkway, and in a finger snap the black backdrop opens like a camera iris to frame the next conversation. The screen-like rectangle jump cuts and pans from one side to the other and changes in size to accommodate more characters. The first time we see the whole stage is at the eventual Felliniesque mise en scene of Café Mimosa, to dramatic effect.

Two couples are involved in the mystery. The play opens with the phone jangling in the castle of Herr Leopold con Rupperstahl (Neil G. Santoro) and his hyper-nervous wife Marie-Louise (Constance Crawford). A similar call is received in Milwaukee by Peter Brown (Paul Hoover), an amiable business owner. His amiable wife June (Margaret Melozzi) later describes her occupation as dedicating herself full-time to working on their relationship. The men feel honored to be chosen for the task of making the exchange, an event upon which "the future of the whole world depends." Boy, we get peril, even!

Perishable artistic director Mark J. Lerman ringmasters all this at a brisk pace and with attention to details. And there sure are plenty of details. In homage to Fellini's surreal imagery, we get The Woman in a White Dress (Carol L. Pegg) gliding and posing under pursuit by The Man in a Dark Suit (James Shelton). There is The Little Spoiled Boy (Drake Cutler-Dutton) being reprimanded by his prim aunt (Wendy Overly). The Woman With an Allergy (Sharon Carpentier) reminds us of suffering in life as she sniffles, garbed in a tissue-festooned dress. (Other costumes by Susan Reid are as plaid and op-art black-and-white as you'd expect in this carnival.)

My favorite performance, and the recurring crowd-pleaser, is that of the parrot. Casey Seymour Krim sits on a perch in the café, wearing a head-hugging feathered hat and an exasperated air that she creates with nuance and personality. The parrot is a nervous wreck because she has to repeat all the conversations she hears. (Fortunately, she's getting hard of hearing.) Whatever fuzzy existential import the play conveys is wrapped up in the enigma of the parrot's plight and responsibility. At the end we know things are getting dire, because the bird is blurting dialogue a beat before the people do.

Romanian-born playwright Cajal finds plenty to send up. The European couple would no sooner assume the missionary position than they'd listen politely to missionaries. The American couple is culturally clueless; June starts to have sex with her hubby in an elevator because "The elevator operator can't speak English." That is the most trenchant as well as the funniest example of Cajal's Absurdist penchant for demonstrating that making meaning out of experience is not an available human skill. Not only do the Americans not understand the words of passion that the copulating Europeans are exclaiming in the next room at the Hotel Mimosa, but the lovers' exchanges ("My mother is at church!" "Trout!") are ridiculous rather than romantic. No wonder the woman in white is eager to misinterpret a grammar lesson by the dark man as a profession of love.

On press night, the ride was a bit bumpy, with some of the actors needing more rehearsal to get their timing down. But that should improve with practice -- and if not, how appropriate for this entertaining reminder of how ludicrous life can be.