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CCE successfully parodies Old West mining town

By Robert Rossi, Managing Editor, on May 2, 2010 1:47 AM

By Robert Rossi, Assoc. Culture Editor – (Photography: Eliza Duggan)

No Country For Dead Men, the spring performance by the Committee for Creative Enactments (CCE), was a hilarious exercise in Old West parody and the theater of the absurd.  Directed by Joseph Mahar, A&S ’10, and performed in the O’Connell House, the play’s plot centers on a string of murders in a gold mining town in Texas.  Every character that owns the right to the town’s gold mine is mysteriously found dead.  The deaths spark an investigation by all of the townspeople, not because murder is illegal, but because any murder committed must be obvious, and therefore cannot be mysterious.

The plot cannot be explained more because the plot was deliberately designed to make no sense.  The CCE is not concerned with storyline or character, and many of the audience members who were willing to abandon traditional expectations found the jokes (many of them improvised), hilarious.  The CCE’s brand of audience interaction also provides for a unique theater experience.  The cast members speak directly to specific audience members without breaking character, and the director and crew often interrupted the performance to address the audience as a whole or just to throw out cookies.  As with all CCE shows, No Country For Dead Men broke off from the main stage at points into various side rooms, each with different characters and a different scene.  Each audience member had to choose which side room to enter, and therefore could not see the entire play without going to multiple performances and watching each side scene.

The show’s best moments came not in the side scenes, however, but when all of the characters shared the main stage.  Stealing the show was Nicholas Vasiliades, A&S ’10, as Daniel Plainview (yes, the same Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood).  Vasiliades nailed all of the mannerisms Daniel Day-Lewis gave Plainview in the 2007 film, and successfully exaggerated them to bring his performance to the perfect point between imitation and caricature.  While there were many jokes that only audience members who’d seen There Will Be Blood would find funny, Vasiliades managed to pull off the biggest laugh off the night.  On trial for murder, Plainview was asked how he pleads.  He immediately responded with a shout of “GUILTY!”, then paused a moment to examine the shocked faces of the other characters, and then added “of being innocent!” He then pointed at the audience and said, “You fools, you look foolish, foolish!” The audience laughed so hard that the next three or four lines were inaudible from my seat.

Preceding the start of No Country For Dead Men was a short play entitled Deckard Kills Lenoy, a parody of the murder-mystery-comedies that the CCE puts on every ear.  Deckard, played by Noel Naczi, CSOM ’10, killed Lenoy, played by Kaz Filus, A&S ’10, in the most obvious manner possible.  Deckard entered Lenoy’s house, told Lenoy point blank he would kill him, and then pulled out a shotgun and murdered him.  The other characters feigned shocked at Lenoy’s death, and ask the audience to vote for who they believed to have killed Deckard.  The verdict, unsurprisingly, was not Deckard.  After the scene’s end, Naczi, still in character, approached Filus, still laying dead as Lenoy, and began whispering to him, inaudibly from the audience.  Watching Filus trying and failing to keep a straight face was one of the highlights of the night and a tribute to Naczi’s skill as an improvisational comedian.  The major knock that one could give No Country For Dead Men was the absence of both Naczi and Filus from major roles.

The show, or both of them if one were to look at it in that light, was a major success.  Sadly, it marked the last CCE performance for nearly half of the group, as seniors dominated the cast and crew list.  Many of the faces from the performance will be missing next year in the O’Connell House, and one cannot help thinking it will be difficult for the CCE to match the hilarity of No Country For Dead Men without them.