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Beware of Dog

nytheatre.com review by Eric Michael Kochmer
August 15, 2005

From Beware of Dog's blurb in the FringeNYC Program Guide: A mysterious dog interrupts a marriage proposal, while a set of strange events and surreal characters further deepen the mystery until when… This absurd play examines the superficiality of human relations while exposing their inherent irony and comedy.What does absurd mean? Nonsense? Blatant ranting about milk for the sake of nothing? Reading about it in a theatre history book you may hear about a tiger who jumps through a window for no apparent reason. Audiences leave asking who… what… where… why the hell would you do this? Absurdity is often an excuse for reckless staging and intrusive spectacle to take the focus off of the plot/story. It is said of some of the great absurdist playwrights that they are so knowledgeable of structure that they can abandon it altogether… I really like that idea… Another fascination of these so-called absurdists: repetition. It can be over intellectualized, but most of the time well written absurdity is simply the primal human force inherent in the play.Beware of Dog: boy sees girl—boy asks girl to marry him (on first meeting, mind you)—girl tells boy that boy needs to ask her father (who we are later told may be blind)—father tells boy that boy needs to ask mother (who we are later told has been bedridden since father and mother were married, so any meeting would be impossible)—mother tells boy to wait—boy is fed up with this and leaves—boy returns to find the mother very upset because in his absence the girl was married to a doctor who wears a mask (who we later find is of course the dog). There is a confrontation between boy and dog, boy wins, girl marries boy. This is the gist of it with some shadow puppetry in between some scenes giving the piece a nice mythical feel.For me, the play is a fable on perception and love, with the boy proving his dedication and commitment to the girl by staying around and fighting off the dog. Well-translated and staged by Turkar Coker from the legendary scroll of the Turkish poet Melih Cevdet Anday, the performance nevertheless could use some smoothing out. I think that the choreography lacks fluidity and is much too plastic, but it does not hamper the pace. I also think that the shadow puppetry needs to either be incredibly cleanly stylized or raw and reckless; instead it's in between, but still highly enjoyable. Hey I was happy to see some shadow puppetry. Chris Prangley, Esra Cizmeci, Turkar Coker, Ayse Eldek Richardson, and Ozgur Cebioglu all do fine jobs as the ensemble. I deeply applaud the New York Theatre Ensemble for producing this work and hope that they keep on bringing more rarely-produced plays like this to the New York stage.