THE BEST OF THE BEST SKETCH FEST 2007

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THE BEST OF THE BEST SKETCH FEST 2007


SKETCH FEAST
LAUGHS COME IN ALL STYLES AND SURPRISES AS COMEDY TROUPES FROM ALL OVER TAKE OVER THE STAGE IN PORTLAND
Monday, July 16th, 2007
Grant Butler

By some luck of the calendar, 2007 is shaping up as a year of milestone birthdays for several of Portland's most important arts festivals. Earlier this month, the Waterfront Blues Festival marked 20 years of blazing guitars by the river. This fall the Time-Based Art Festival will present its fifth edition of dance and performance art. And on the weekend, the lower-key Best of the Best Sketch Fest also marked its fifth birthday, with a lineup of seven troupes in two nights at Artists Repertory Theatre.

While Sketch Fest may not draw the mega-numbers of those other festivals, the impressive caliber of talent it attracts from across the nation proves its artistic importance. Sketch comedy can be cynically topical and acerbic at times, abstract and absurdist at others. Sometimes, for a bit of mental palate cleansing, it can be purposely empty-headed.

Friday's opening night lineup may have been the best example in the festival's history of just how much variety there can be in sketch comedy. Kicking things off was Slow Children at Play, from Boston University. At lots of festivals, student groups warm up for the "real" performers later on, but it would be a serious mistake to relegate the Children to toss-off stature. Their 45-minute set (almost all Sketch Fest performances run less than an hour) had some wonderful creative touches, including a bit involving inept Greek warriors who board a Trojan horse to attack a Roman fortress, realizing too late that they've forgotten to bring any weapons.

The Bellingham, Wash., duo The Cody Rivers Show is unlike any act the festival has presented. Like an adrenaline rush from too many hits of Red Bull, Andrew Connor and Mike Mathieu (clad in snazzy lime green coveralls and white-boy 'fro wigs) moved through a breakneck routine that combined dancing, singing and some skewerings of consumer culture, tourism and tired vaudeville-comedy conventions (hand buzzers, squirting lapel flowers and the like). Some routines experimented with mixed-up timelines, forcing you to reconstruct events in your head. At times, sketches changed so quickly that it was tough to tell where one ended and another began. That seemed exactly the point. This isn't safe material. It's stuff to make you lean forward and do some mental work for your laughs.

The all-women New York group MEAT has become one of the Sketch Fest's most popular acts, and its new show "Camp Blood" was a fun spoof of cliched slasher horror films, with some nods to the local turf. That massive Paul Bunyan statue in North Portland proved to have a murderous streak, and a Disney store in Lake Oswego provided the setting for an exploration about why there's never been a black cartoon princess from the house of Mickey Mouse. Girl Scouts got knocked off in a bloodbath, a killer stalked teens with raging hormones, and evil English children stirred up their own mayhem. Stephen King would be proud.

Saturday night's offerings took a more cerebral turn, beginning with Dark Eyed Strangers, a Chicago group that features former Portlander Tony St. Clair. The sketches here were intricately interwoven, creating a larger story arc that revealed itself as the show progressed. But ultimately it was a complicated spoof of a "Scooby-Doo"-style cartoon.

The two-woman Los Angeles group Karla came next, and Megan Kellie and Marion Oberle may have offered the festival's deepest insights into affairs of the heart. With hilarious interplay, their sketches showed the complexities that reveal themselves through cocktail parties, corporate culture and even the afterlife. Their concluding sequence about an extremely bored girl who misses the glorious transformations of the world around her because she chooses to stay in bed evoked laughter and tears.

Portland's The 3rd Floor was last on the bill, and unfortunately the hometown crew offered the festival's most ragged performance. Clocking in at just less than two hours (time limits don't apply if it's your festival, apparently), the group's array of bits seemed under-rehearsed, bloated with performers, and lacking a cohesive theme.

Granted, when you're the host troupe for a festival, you can indulge yourself a little. But when you push the audience past the squirming point, it's time to scale things back. If the festival is the Best of the Best, shouldn't the material measure up to the standard?

(EDITORS NOTE: The 3rd Floor ran an 1:40, was jammed packed with audience members, and had a 20-member cast, featuring members from the past 11 years. We also ran 1:15 in rehearsal, so we weren't planning on running so long. We deserved a bit of a spanking for it. Sorry to those who squirmed. And thank you for the standing ovation. And much love and thanks to Grant Butler for being such a great friend to sketch comedy and always giving T3F and the Sketch Fest such great coverage. And HUGE thanks to all of the troupes that came to town and kicked Portland's ass. (and also thanks for keeping your shows to a reasonable length....heh...in the future, we'll try to do the same.))