As maddening as life has been since March of 2020, there have also been some bright moments when the weight of these past several months briefly melted away and our hearts became a little lighter and freer. Many of those times, it was the arts and the people who conceive, develop and perform creative expression through music, theater and dance who made those respites, those small escapes from care, possible.
Depending on your tastes, The Exponential Festival might just be the type of relief you’re craving right now, too. A month-long festival held in January and rooted in Brooklyn, Exponential is “dedicated to New York City-based emerging artists working in experimental performance”. Celebrating the non-normative, the festival focuses on the avant-garde and the underground. Stage artist, Theresa Buchheister, helped found the festival in 2016 to augment the usual options during New York’s standard theater festival season. Shows are one night only and run times vary. Although they’re free, donations to artists are encouraged. You’ll want to.
It’s January and the festival is still a go; virtually of course. If ‘Stiff Drink!? with Dr. Eustice Sissy (Psy. D) presents: The Corona Cam Show is at all indicative of what you can expect, the festival is everything it claims to be; “a pleasure, a mess, a thrill and a dream”. Because of its subversive simplicity; The Corona Cam Show, which aired on the 13th, may be one of the tamer shows you’ll find at the festival where weird is A-OK.
Furloughed from his live-audience cabaret gig, Eustice (Lee Rayment) has moved to Youtube where he dispenses dating and relationship advice to callers. With his smooth pate, tiny hand drawn moustache and light eyes, Eustice strikes a distinctive pose. With him is the guy who makes it all happen, Toby (Fernando Gonzalez), the podcast’s editor, tech guru and Eustice’s might as well be sidekick who has a way of stealing the limelight as well as a good amount of Eustice’s thunder throughout the 30-minute experience.
With a wealth of understated comedy concentrated in its core, The Corona Cam Show makes you smirk wryly and laugh freely as the dynamic between Eustice and Toby keeps shifting and buckling; usually with Eustice winding up on the short end.
Gonzalez, “born in Chicago and raised in Indiana” is every bit the scamp he admits to being on his actor’s profile page. Now residing in New York and (usually) kept busy with a wide range of acting projects, he’s got just the right look to play the guileless, but not really, Toby. Wearing a Love Me Tender emblazoned sweatshirt, a mass of tight black curls haloing his face and looking out at the world in sincere puppy dog eyes, he’d make a great bait and switch artist. Here he satisfies himself upstaging Eustice at nearly every turn.
The show’s callers, or “queriers” superficially look and sound mainstream enough until they start telling why they’re calling in. One wants to know if Eustice thinks he has a chance with a woman whose son just happens to sound like a menacing alien from another galaxy. Later, a woman asks whether she should disclose to her partner that she harbors a resolute self-awareness that she is royal. When she explains, she’s disarmingly convincing.
Listening to Toby try to explain to Eustice that his quarantining has been going incredibly well, especially in the love department, manages to be both precious and hilarious. Evidently, finding love in the middle of a pandemic really is a thing.
Was The Corona Cam Show satire, absurdist; or parody taken to a another dimension? Who knows or cares? But it did check all four boxes. It was “a pleasure, a mess, a thrill and a dream”.
With few exceptions, shows run continuously through the entire month. Visit https://www.theexponentialfestival.org/calendar for details.