Humor & intelligence

God bless Buck Busfield. To open the B Street Theatre’s 2012-13 season, he has chosen two one-act plays that entertain viscerally and intellectually and that challenge convention (and to some extent, our expectations of a B Street show). They’re also extremely funny.

Looks & Money is the title of the program that features The Ugly One by German playwright Marius von Mayenburg and The New Tenant by Eugene Ionesco. A cast of four B Street regulars stars under Busfield’s direction.

In The Ugly One, Jason Kuykendall stars as Lette, a man so unspeakably ugly that his boss (Greg Alexander) chooses an assistant (Peter Story) to make the presentation on his latest engineering breakthrough because his looks would surely turn off any audience. Stephanie McVay plays Lette’s wife, who confirms the boss’ harsh assessment. A trip to a plastic surgeon (Alexander again) results in a face so desirable, that soon Lette is pursued by women and emulated by men everywhere.

How do you handle seeing your own face—which isn’t even your face—everywhere you go? This relatively new play (2007) challenges our notions of identity and the importance of appearance in the context of outrageous comedy.

The New Tenant, from 1955, meanwhile, is from the originator and master of theater of the absurd. Its fault may be that it doesn’t go much beyond other of the playwright’s works (The Chairs and Rhinoceros come immediately to mind) in skewering modern society. It does, however, effectively challenge the physical comedy chops of the cast.

Alexander stars as the tenant of an apartment that gradually is filled with furniture to the point of isolating the man from the outside world—just as he wants it to. McVay has a comic turn as his would-be caretaker, and Story and Kuykendall play the beleaguered movers who fill the small B Street stage with more props than you’d think possible. It’s surreal and really, really funny. But Ionesco’s criticism of consumerism and isolation is blunted by the sheer comedic force of the production.