machines machines machines machines machines machines machines

The loopy, anarchic machines machines machines… is about—you guessed it—machines. And mostly, they work. Really, it’s awe-inspiring the things that designers Steven and Billy Blaise Dufala get a simple ball to do. But what leaves us weeping with laughter, drumming our heels against the floor, is when they don’t work. “A little patience…and a little pulling…” murmurs an actor when a bucket fails to descend. The audience goes like clockwork into whoops.

The adorably unhinged Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford, creators of the whimsical all wear bowlers, have gathered up Pig Iron Theater Company’s Quinn Bauriedel for a testimonial to American perversity. The three have built themselves a strange and teetering world, a boy’s dream in which the couch is a secret passage, the toilet a throne, and breakfast requires seven Rube Goldberg devices and a crank-operated banana-cutter. They are a patriotic crew (a boxing glove punches a trigger and whizz! A flag goes up the pole), and Bauriedel’s puzzled drawl could be Will Ferrell doing George Bush. No wonder, then, that these gearheads overcomplicate everything, quiver with paranoia and resort to torture at the drop of a (ball that hits a lever that drops a) hat.

Machines isn’t flawless—some dramaturgical springs have gone flat, and the nattering dialogue hopscotches between hysterical and aimless. But the three lunatics at its center function as perfect perpetual engines. Where another actor would quail in the face of a story line sputtering or a piece of toast going AWOL off the stage, these boys charge recklessly ahead. They’ll do anything to get the job done. They’re machines.—Helen Shaw

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