NEYT: Clownton Abbey 11/6/15
Clown Town is an original clown show, inspired, in part, by “Downton Abby”, “Faulty Towers”, “Mr. Bean”, “The Pink Panther”, “Charlie Chaplin”, “The Marx Brothers”, and many more of the world’s past and present masters of comedy. Perhaps it should be called “Clownton Abby”, in that it will have a royal family and all sorts of butlers and maids and cooks and footmen, all clowns of various shapes and sizes and persuasions.
In the clown world, as in the real world, there is a “pecking order”, “Top Banana-Boss Clown”, right on down to “Bottom Banana, the fool or klutz clown”. Orders go down the line, from boss the servants, while complaints and mistakes go up the line from the klutz to the boss. Each actor will have a distinct role to play and a distinct, personally inspired costume to play it in. The set will be designed to offer ample opportunity for mistakes and ridiculous situations; perhaps a revolving door, similar to Charlie Chaplin’s “Murphy Bed”, or a dumb waiter which yields anything but ordinary food. The play will be written from carefully structured situations where the actors twist the ordinary and mundane into the hilariously bizarre. What is sure is that, no matter what happens in the crazy “Clownton” Estate, all of the clown characters will fail magnificently, bounce right up and keep on going as if they meant to have, even wanted the “pie in the face”.
