By Ernest Kearney — During the 1950s, when advances in the field of computer sciences first emerged on the world stage, with all its future promise and potential shimmering in the eyes of dreamers like J.C.R Licklider, Larry Roberts, Tim Berners-Lee and others the Internet was conceived as an arena of research and collaboration for great minds and ideas.
But about a year ago the Internet had yet another opportunity to do what has come to be recognized as its true purpose – which is to pluck innocuous or nonsequential elements from humanity’s global mosh pit, then to magnify and distort the same into either apophonic aspects of some all-consuming conspiracy theory or lob like red meat into the midst of the wolf packs which passes for social debate nowadays.
That “element” a year ago was His Holiness the Dalai Lama asking a young boy to “suck his tongue.” The event at the center of Benjamin Schwartz’s aptly entitled play Suck My Tongue.
Schwartz, who also directs, has corralled the implosion of madness resulting from this event into the confines of an American PR team employed to do spin control by the Gaden Phodrang Foundation (I’m assuming, as I had a tad bit of trouble hearing some of the play due to my poor choice in seating.)
Schwartz has a skilled and talented cast in Ryan Lisman, Jaz Dicey, Spencer Weitzel and Brian Graves and his direction slings up the manic mad-cap of his script nicely. This is the “wackiest” work Schwartz has brought to the Fringe, and I found it eminently entertaining. (Though I did think the insanity of the situation worked best when it arose from the quartet’s own collective maladroitness.)
Suck My Tongue is intended to be the debut production of the Catharsis Theatre Collective and it has the potential of serving that function very well.
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Playing During the Hollywood Fringe Festival 2024
at
The Broadwater (Black Box)
6322 Santa Monica Blvd.
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Sunday June 23 2024, 8:00 PM | 1hr
Saturday June 29 2024, 4:30 PM | 1hr
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