The Granduncle Quadrilogy

FUR WHAT IT'S WORTH Harrington keeps warm in chilly weather.

Photograph: Ken Stein/Runs With Scissors Photography

Had Dr. Seuss smoked opium, he might have penned The Granduncle Quadrilogy. TONY contributor Jeff Lewonczyk’s play is set in an ancient ice-bound society with eerie allegorical similarities to our own. Citizens invoke the name of mythical martyr Kissel to justify everything from murder to marriage and war. A man called simply Granduncle (Richard Harrington) spins four wacky yarns about his adventures in the Land of Ice, assisted by a voice-over dripping with ironic understatement. A sort of Forrest Gump for the Ice Age, our naive Granduncle endures violence, heartbreak and various forays into enemy territory, unwittingly surviving and almost finding redemption in the final tale.

Clad in otherworldly Eskimo garb and speaking imaginary languages, the Brick troupe seems to be going for social critique by way of parody. And it does manage a few surprising pieces of comic invention. But the presentation is often lackluster, and the long wartime sequences drain the play of its fun. When a sadistic general praises Kissel while torturing his own drug-addled mother with a whip, it’s hard to laugh in the next scene, in which Mom gets high on the fumes from fermented albatross eggs. In a lighter episode, Granduncle is taken hostage by an exotic race of earthy females who worship him as a demigod and offer him a bride. There may be an edifying lesson here (make love, not war?), but only one moral really comes through: a cliché in woolly mammoth furs is still a cliché.