WHISKEY-POWERED
TACO FIGHT
IF YOU LIKE THEATER OF THE ABSURD,
‘WHISKEY-POWERED TACO FIGHT’ IS FOR YOU
Carol Wells
A typical young couple is
looking through a jumble of items on a garage sale table.
The woman holds up and examines a bald baby doll far past
its prime. “Does your wife collect dolls?” she
asks the seller. “My wife collects flies,” he
replies. “She’s been dead about 10 years
now.”
There’s plenty of snappy back-and-forth dialogue like
that in The 3rd Floor’s newest sketch-comedy show,
“Whiskey-Powered Taco Fight,” along with spoofs
of cop shows and courtroom dramas, food employed as
weapons, and motifs that appear and disappear throughout
including bears, a burglar with no pants, and a giant
annoying doughnut.
Best described as vaudeville of the Theater of the Absurd,
the show borrows its multi-sketch structure and variety of
forms like live acting, music, and video from vaudeville.
In the Absurdist tradition, its humor comes from the witty
wordplay, plus sometimes-violent slapstick and off-the-wall
scenarios that startle the audience, keeping it off kilter
with the unexpected or the logically improbable. The
laughter comes from a shared understanding that the events
of our lives are completely arbitrary, and that the rules
and laws we are expected to live by have been imposed
purely to mask that fact.
Thus we are presented with a doctor who notes during an
ultrasound on a pregnant woman that the standard
“womb-mounted Gatling guns protecting the baby”
are correctly in place; a man sitting in a leather club
chair whose stream of consciousness observations about life
include, “There ain’t no man, woman, or child
alive afraid of a vampire puddle”; a video
documentary about a little-known Dutch holiday involving
yellow Labrador retrievers; and a nightclub act performed
by a woman in a bear suit.
New players this season are Chris Faux, who has been a
member of the video-sketch troupe Cinema Queso, and Val
Landrum, a fine dramatic actress. Landrum proves to be a
terrific comic actress, too, but with a style more formal
and polished than that of the freewheeling performers
around her. It’s like watching Dame Judi Dench guest
star on "Saturday Night Live."
Rounding out the cast are The 3rd Floor regulars Jordana
Barnes, Ted Douglass, Jason Keller, Kevin-Michael Moore and
Michael Teufel, journeymen performers all.
WHISKEY-POWERED
TACO FIGHT
“WILLAMETTE WEEK PICK”
Brittany Rogers
With a bottle of Johnnie
Walker, a round of “grab-ass” and a doughnut
that simply cannot be trusted, the 3rd Floor sketch comedy
troupe presents an exhibition of traditional sketch-comedy
proportions.
The show is filled with comically nonlinear plots and
clever situational comedy that aptly plays on the
awkwardness of the socially inept. With the addition of the
comic skills from group newcomers Chris Faux and Val
Landrum, the 11-year-old troupe keeps audiences enchanted
as they try to guess which will be the next eccentric
character to emerge from behind the curtain.
With the occasional gritty language and peek at nude flesh,
this show is best suited for a mature audience. However, it
successfully manages to dangle dangerously close to the
edge of unbecoming behavior while still remaining tactfully
endearing.