The Rise and Fall of Miles and Milo

Description
**** [FOUR STARS] “It’s an art abattoir in there!” scream Miles and Milo at the height of the deliciously histrionic protest–performance piece that opens their show. The art-insurrectionists have spent ten years protesting to crowds of one or two people outside the Sunshine Foundation for the Arts—-an organization, founded by fiendish Anderson Sackville Jr., dedicated to destroying good art by handing out enormous grants for the bad. Pompously, Milo (Nat Cassidy) declares the pair to be “the greatest living creative artists in the entire world” because their numerous applications for funding have all been turned down. Modestly, Miles (Sara Jeanne Asselin, who also wrote this 55-minute piece) agrees. Asselin’s ruthless skewering of the pretentious experimental-arts scene--Miles and Milo’s big concept is to create a duct-tape animal menagerie--delivers big laughs as the pair’s platonic artist-bond is rocked when the devious foundation awards them an infinite grant. Doris (Gayle Robbins) steals all of her scenes as Sackville’s comely assistant, and her comedic interactions with his disembodied voice (somewhere between the Wizard of Oz and George Steinbrenner on "Seinfeld") provide some of the show’s funniest moments. An unnecessary final scene underlines the duo’s decline too heavy-handedly, but it doesn’t spoil the body of this accomplished multimedia work.--Clare Lambe, Senior Associate Features Editor