“Urinetown” co-creator Greg Kotis takes us to another future dystopian society in this small, cheeky musical that’s part of the New York City Fringe Festival. With a banjo-driven bluegrass score backed by a three-piece band, Pa, Ma, Boy and Girl sing of their struggle to survive off-the-grid on a mountain top, one of the few habitable places on Earth after a series of ecological melt-downs. In the first of eleven ditties, Pa and Ma (Kotis and his actual wife Ayun Halliday) welcome us to their tale of a post-apocalyptic future:
“Here’s how humanity will make its final stand.
We hope you like the show, the actors, and the band.
And if you find the tale too foolish or too cruel,
you can leave, but we will keep your cash,
no refunds is the rule.”
I suppose there is some cruelty and tomfoolery in “The End of All Flesh,” but nobody is likely to leave. It’s too short, for one (60 minutes), and too many theatergoers are vying for too few performances. (Only two remain.) It’s also too funny.
In conversation with the “twenty-first century American theater-goers” in the audience at the Wild Project, these hillbilly “survivalist caricatures” discourse on a variety of intellectual concepts. Like the patriarchy.
“Turns out when society collapses ancient ways re-assert themselves,” Ma explains to us, as she guts and skins a pig. “Ain’t that so,Pa?”
“I got a gun. That makes me Patriarch. That and my genitalia,” replies Pa
Pa sits around playing his banjo while Ma does all the hunting and gutting, cooking and cleaning. “I do the work of governance,” Pa explains. “I tell you what to do.”
They discuss the “State of Nature” to which they have returned, laying out the philosophical debate through the ages, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagining that people lived in harmony before government intruded, while Thomas Hobbes imagined that prehistoric mankind were murderous savages.
Another song humorously recounts Greek mythology as a bloody cycle of family dysfunction
Eventually, something of a plot kicks in. Boy (Sammy Pignalosa) wants to marry Girl (Maithili Ginde) and “start building babies,” but his folks object, Pa violently. So Boy and Girl cook up a strategy, which leads to tragedy. One might feel “The End of All Flesh” is of Biblical proportions. (The title, after all, is a reference to Genesis 6:13-17, when God tells Noah why he’s destroying humanity with a giant flood.) But the company sends us off with a twang:
What the future holds is anyone’s guess
thought signs are pointing toward some dire days
In the meantime, we will manage the stress
by performing and attending some new musical plays
The End of All Flesh
Theater of the Apes at The Wild Project
Running time: 60 minutes
Tickets: $25
Remaining showtimes: April 18th (8:10pm), April 20th at 7:00pm).
Written by Greg Kotis
Directed by Avery Rose Pedell.
Cast: Maithili Ginde as Girl, Ayun Halliday as Ma, Greg Kotis as Pa, Sammy Pignalosa as Boy
and The Previouslies band: music director Melody Allegra Berger (fiddle), Stephen Elkins (guitar and accordion), & Marty Isenberg (bass)
