High Five @ Kitchen Dog Theater
—Martha Heimberg
Funny, passionate, poetic, absurd, brand-new and as swift as a magician! High Five is Kitchen’s Dog Theater’s suite of five super-short plays, all world premieres, each an ode to one of our five senses and featuring a cast of five first-rate actors: up close, laughing, sweating, singing, dancing, and telling it.
The whole thing flies by in just under 80 minutes. Uh huh.
Directed by Kitchen Dog co-artistic director Tina Parker, the show opens the company’s New Work Festival 2022, a series of staged in-person readings followed by a moderated discussion focused on developing and creating new plays.
If KDT’s opening Mainstage production is a hint of what’s to come, you’ll want to stay tuned to the whole Festival. Performing the various roles of humans, angels, and tree-scent car fresheners in the five plays are Whitney LaTrice Coulter, Marti Etheridge, Lee George, Max Hartman and Kat Lozano.
Matt Lyle’s take on sight is titled “A Dance of Joy.” And boy is it ever! Athletic Lee George slips out and hangs a photo of a pretty face on the wall, and then dances around the stage, preening and grinning to choreographer Danielle Georgiou’s ecstatic moves. He turns his back, then faces us and showers the audience in lovely white ribbon bombs unfurling like a wedding celebration. What joy, right? But the real hilarity happens when his family members start banging on the door. Little brother is hogging the bathroom!
Migdalia Cruz focuses on taste in “Dinner with Dee,” a touching and poetic dialogue between a lonely woman (a feisty, suddenly vulnerable Kat Lozano) trying to get a surprise visitor (George, whose character is losing his black feathers) to eat some soup. He insists he left his sense of taste behind in his last life. He’s here on some timely mission, and is getting impatient with all this “earthy broth” stuff. What does a feathered black creature taste like? You’ll have to ask Dee.
Regina Taylor’s “What’s Heard Between Words” is a fierce, profoundly felt narrative focused on hearing, or, more exactly, on what is held back when the human voice is cut off by fear or outright torture. Coulter, a high-energy singer and glowing presence throughout, recalls hearing family tales of her great grandmother, a powerful outspoken black slave silenced in so cruel a manner that only her eyes reflect her unspoken fury. The other actors gather around and help act out how this pointed metaphor becomes reality, as Black women hold their tongues—and see with angry eyes the injustices they endure. What a legacy.
Allison Moore’s funny, charming “Human Resource” examines our sense of touch by focusing on the stressed-out head of an HR department, trying to deal with an employee (a quirky, stubborn Etheridge) who hates being back at the office. She does her work, but also some “extra stuff” on what she considers her own time—though HR disagrees. Hartman, the HR guy with a foot fetish to deal with himself, is virile, hearty and furtive all at once. Set designer Clare Floyd DeVries and video projections designer Natalie Rose Mabry recreate the awful zoned-out Zoom meetings we all know and loathe. Etheridge and Hartman are pure fun. Their comic timing in the break room scene is a total hoot.
Jonathan Norton’s crazy take on smell, “Ode to Zeb,” goes on beyond absurd, and reaches a kind of tragi-comic epiphany in maybe 15 minutes. Bourbon (Coulter, costumed as a felt green tree with a loop for mirror hanging) is an aging car freshener with a can-do attitude who loves her car owner, and has learned through sheer determination and breathing techniques to tolerate vile odors from cigarette smoke to dog-poop-on-shoe, and a lot of disgusting smells in between. Daisy Fields (Lozano in a frosty blue version of the same tree outfit) is the newbie just pulled off the rack to take over, and Bourbon is gung-ho to toughen up this sissy kid for the crap ahead. Bourbon recalls her madcap party days with manly Royal Pine (Hartman) and sexy Black Ice (George), and the trials of dealing with prissy New Car Scent (Etheridge). Choreographer Danielle Georgiou has them all spinning on stools, in and out of line formation, complete with collisions and spills. Poor Bourbon! Her expiration date draws near. Who knew such drama goes on in our stinky cars when we’re not there? Kudos to costume designer Cayla Tally for hanging Norton’s sweet, silly vision right up there for us to laugh at.
WHEN: Through June 26 (and streaming June 30-July 3)
WHERE: 2600 N. Stemmons Fwy, Suite 180, Dallas
