COIL Festival: Mac Wellman's "Muazzez" opens at The Chocolate Factory

Actor Steve Mellor sits at a small table and gazes at the audience with his doughy, oblong face and initially deadpan expression and begins to spill a torrent of words. This verbal current flows fast, faster, fastest without cease--miraculously, without tongue-twisting--and, at times, will rise to a level of dark bitterness. That Mellor--occupying The Chocolate Factory's earthly space as well as imagined interstellar space strewn with asteroids--introduces himself as an "abandoned cigar factory" with "a zygodactyly foot" is only part of the fun of Muazzez, a 45-minute monologue derived from short stories by known word wizard Mac Wellman.

"There's no drift to my thought," Mellor/Wellman tells us. "My thought is a rooted thing." Sure. No drift but definitely a well-greased sci-fi sequence on the move and speeding you along with it, scrambling your brain along with Wellman's mythopoetic play and scramble of words. We're invited to envision the high Eulalians of whom nothing is known except that they "builded" the cigar factories. We learn of the "primal radial symmetry" of "a series of spokes or spokey type spindles radiating from a deep and frosty central secret," which sounds kid of tasty. There are "non-self hedges and the hegemony of the self's perfect picture of the world" and something Wellman calls the "ambulatory frightwig of unappetizing complication," which strikes me as a useful insult to hurl at the next person to cross me. Yeah.

I am completely won over by this "succession a stratigraphic variorum," this "placing of jars and jarring of places" and Mellor's virtuoso performance that charges and populates nearly bare space with the high Eulalian magic(k) of words.

A COIL Festival co-presentation of Performance Space 122 and The Chocolate Factory, Muazzez runs through January 17. For complete schedule and ticketing details, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

Paul Lazar is out of this world!

Just five minutes from Grand Central Station, there's a curiously-enchanting world known as 1965UU, created in all its fabulous fabulosity by playwright Mac Wellman from his book of imaginary tales about real asteroids--A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds--and directed by Stephen Mellor.

1965UU is a tiny world inhabited by the likes of the looming, mean, lustily-flatulent Albedo, the delicious but elusively-speedy Rosalind, and a thoughtful, heartsick but resilient soul, Ravenelo, played by Paul Lazar. Lazar--co-founder, with Annie-B Parsons, of Big Dance Theater--gives one of his cherishable performances as the focus of the piece, acting like a spinning wheel that refines Wellman's textual flights of absurd fancy through every well-considered, masterfully-coordinated inflection of movement, glance and voice. Supporting Lazar in what is considered a solo performance are narrator Heather Christian, dancer Kate Marks, and actors Ed Jewett and Daniel Manley.

Now through October 4, the asteroid 1965UU will be in residence at The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City, which is certainly as good a place as any for a miniscule space body that appears to be a long, metallic platform spanning the length of the performance space.  Get yourself a front-row seat, and see a show in which, thrillingly, sparks really fly!

For tickets, directions and more information, click here.