Now The Uncool Are The Coolest Of All

by Peter Marks

Nowadays, the eyewear of choice among really cool people onstage is that favored not by European movie stars, but by accountants. The glasses made famous by the likes of Clark Kent and Woody Allen are popping up regularly at New York’s more outré theatrical addresses. There they are, perched on the nose of David Latham, the shorter of the duo of hipster comics known as Premium Bob, in the team’s new show, “Dobie McDobie,” at the Flea Theater in SoHo. Erin Quinn Purcell, playing a lovelorn bombshell, dons the fashionably unfashionable frames in “Duet! A Romantic Fable,” a sendup of American courtship at the Actors’ Playhouse in the West Village. And isn’t that a pair on one of those pointedly distracted guys in “Total Fictional Lie,” the unslick performance piece at Performance Space 122 in the East Village, by the slacker troupe Elevator Repair Service?

The eyewear of the brainy, the weakling, the social misfit represents a kind of visual shorthand: it proclaims the wearer’s outsider status. Still, appearances can be deceiving. Mild-mannered Clark actually has superpowers; the neurotic Woody of the movies is, of all things, a romantic leading man. Similarly, the owlish players in the aforementioned downtown shows are anything but squares. Sporting the dorky spectacles are self-assured young entertainers who only look like lifetime members of the National Honor Society. Who they aspire to be, in fact, are hip exemplars of an emerging sensibility in performance art and comedy that anoints the outcast, that celebrates the nerd. To be nerdy these days, it seems, is to be cutting-edge. From Andy Dick, the irrepressibly geeky gofer on the sitcom “News Radio,” to the performers on cable comedy shows like “Viva Variety” and “Show,” to almost any character Jim Carrey elects to play, nerdiness is a true comic virtue, a sure sign of in-the-know sophistication.

These clownish goof-offs are such self-conscious put-ons, so redolent of show-biz savvy, that the audience is always aware that the actor is “on” and not really playing a character. Their performances, cynicism posing as innocence, are emblematic of a seen-it-all, media-saturated age, a period in which nothing seems spontaneous and everything in politics and culture is suspected of being rigged, a time when the greatest humiliation of all is not to be in on the joke.

A spate of new stage shows, occupying some of the smarter downtown precincts, are the newest outlets of what might be called nerd culture. Taking cues from such varied sources as Richard Foreman, Andy Warhol and Andy Kaufman, these quirky productions poke fun at the diversions of the egghead set.

“Total Fictional Lie,” for instance, is a deadpan lampoon of the washed-out Middle American characters who fascinate documentary filmmakers. “Dobie McDobie” takes on, among other things, the inflated myth-making properties of television news. And in “Madame Fury,” at the Here Theater in SoHo, the comic actor Blair Fell and his company, Aunt Bea’s Dilemma, make an all-out assault on that outpost of high culture, ballet.

All three have some wildly amusing moments; in “Madame Fury,” Fell provides some choice lines to a tyrannical, weight-obsessed ballet master based on George Balanchine, given to declarations like “What is a heart but an extra five pounds you should diet away?” But at other times the cleverness of these productions seems a bit twee, and even mechanical. The difficulty with this world-weary brand of humor is similar to the problem encountered in standing at a mirror and practicing a wink: the harder you work to induce the reflex, the less successful it can become.

It’s revealing that some of the best jokes are manifestations of old-fashioned physical comedy, as when Latham’s Premium Bob partner, Paul Boocock, turns to the audience and flashes a charlatan’s million-dollar smile, or when the ballerinas of the rival companies in “Madame Fury” do battle like tutu-clad ninjas, arabesquing to the death. Yet there is more than enough imagination and comic energy exhibited in each of these shows to anticipate, and desire, even bigger things from these companies. Elevator Repair Service provides the weirdest immersion in nerd culture: “Total Fictional Lie” is a kind of live-action version of the “Real Audio” cartoon segments created by Robert Smigel on “Saturday Night Live,” interspersed with the company’s jerky (and mesmerizing) dance sequences, choreographed by Katherine Profeta.

In the hourlong show, performed on P.S. 122’s bare stage, random scenes from actual documentaries — including films about Paul Anka, the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, and a door-to-door Bible salesman — are re-enacted by the seven-member cast. The funniest features Robert Cucuzza as the Bible hawker, trying to close a deal with a nearly catatonic homemaker played by Leslie Buxbaum; the banal scene repeats twice, with the actors delivering hilarious approximations of the film subjects’ accents. “We take oddahs,” Cucuzza says again and again, and it’s only after the eighth or ninth repetition that his meaning (orders) becomes clear, at least to us; Buxbaum remains blissfully oblivious.

The gags here are a rarefied sort; they have to do with how at odds the language and movement of the theater are with everyday conversation and behavior. Under the direction of John Collins and Steve Bodow, “Total Fictional Lie” affords a fresh and surprising, if more than a little oblique, perspective. It’s a perspective shared by “Dobie McDobie,” with its cross-cutting style and pop-culture references dished out to the audience at hyper-speed, and by “Madame Fury,” which expects audiences to be on their toe shoes, too. These shows are, in their way, advanced exams as much they are entertainments, which only makes sense, since eggheads tend to do well on their S.A.T.’s.