COMEDIAN WALKS ON DARK SIDE
Fringe play relevant in Trump era
The title of the play couldn’t be more apt for its neophyte director: veteran Montreal standup Karl Knox had at times felt like pounding nails in the floor with his forehead.
Even though the odds and then his age were against him, Knox had long dreamed of writing and directing a play. Well, half his dream has come true: Knox makes his directing debut with the classic series of Eric Bogosian monologues Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead, now playing at the Wiggle Room as part of the Fringe festival.
“It’s never too late, even at the age of 60,” says the long, lean and bald Knox, a fixture on the comedy scene for over 30 years. “I had been in a production of the play almost 20 years ago, and had since been looking for an excuse to stage it myself.
“Although the play is set in the early 1990s, it remains as relevant as ever. The more I read it, the more I could see that one could draw a straight line from the voices in this piece to the people who voted for Trump. Meaning that we were always on this path, and Trump was really always in our future.”
Knox felt the play would provide an excellent showcase for a variety of actors. To that end, he has conscripted players — including Daniel Carin, Dan Derkson, Shauna Feldman, Jason Hatrick, Rodney Ramsey and Troy Stark — not from the usual pool of theatre actors in town, but from the local standup and burlesque fronts.
Knox also dons the thespian cap himself, assuming the role of the lead monologist. It’s quite the stretch: he morphs from his more recognizable, mellow standup persona to a rather irate right-wing radio jock à la Rush Limbaugh.
“The things that this hateradio character points to are the arguments that we’re now hearing from the alt-right people — and it’s scary.”
Knox’s transformation is also quite scary as he takes to the Wiggle Room’s stage to rehearse the play’s opening monologue:
“What a wonderful place America must have been (in the 1950s). What a wonderful world. I’d like to be there right now, in a world without problems,” Knox blurts, his voice rising dramatically.
“But then I remembered this dream I had last night. … It’s the middle of the night and who should come into my bedroom but Bill Clinton. It was a nightmare. … He takes me out of the house and down the street, and we drop into an open manhole.
And we’re walking through the sewers and I’m thinking: ‘Where is this man taking me?’ I never trusted this guy.
“Then we come to this cave, with all these people lying around on mattresses, smoking pot and crack. And through the haze, I see the usual suspects: Whoopi Goldberg, and she’s reading the Communist Manifesto. And there’s Ralph Nader, bitching about something, and Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins planning peace rallies, and Madonna is having sex, and there’s Ice-T and Ice Cube and people with rings on their noses and holding their welfare cheques. And I’m horrified. And Bill is smiling and says: ‘This isn’t hell — this is America 1994.” You get the picture. Knox has everyone in the room transfixed with his machine-gun delivery. He insists this is the easiest of his monologues, lasting only 3½ minutes. He closes the play with an intense 12-minute number — about a guilt-ridden middle-class man unable to enjoy the fruits of his labour — that appears to be meth-fuelled.
“As a comedian, I can barely remember my few lines,” he jokes. “But this is totally different. I don’t know how I remember. I guess it’s because I’m able to internalize it all.”
Next up on stage is Feldman, delivering a down-in-the-dumps recitation.
“My character is essentially checking out,” she says. “She’s done. It was also originally written for a guy.”
The role is a far cry from Feldman’s best-known work. On the burlesque scene, under her stage name of Elle Diabloe, she is cheerier.
“I’m Shauna Feldman when people want to hear me speak, and I’m Elle Diabloe when they don’t want to hear me speak,” she cracks.
So here, Feldman speaks — actually, rants most convincingly: “I hate the taste of fresh squeezed orange juice. I hate the smell of fresh ground coffee. I hate standing up. I hate breathing. I hate waiting to die.” You get the picture. Next up is Stark, who plays an angry homeless man trying unsuccessfully to pick up spare change in a subway car.
“It’s quite a departure for me,” he says. “I spend most of my working life on a stage as a comedian really trying to make people laugh, not terrorize them.”
Fortunately, Stark does a second monologue in the piece, in which he doesn’t antagonize and he does amuse.
It’s not by chance that Knox cast some of these characters. Feldman and Derkson had cast Knox in a Fringe offering last year — a peeler parody of The Flintstones called Bedrock Burlesque, wherein Feldman reverted to her Elle Diabloe persona in playing Wilma Flintstone.
“I had a gas doing that,” Knox says. “So I really got bitten by the bug to get up on stage again.
“What I love about this play is that while it’s quite profane, it’s also rather profound. There’s genuine angst, but there’s also some genuine good humour — admittedly all dark, but devilishly delicious.”