The Endless Adventures of MC Kat

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“Jeffrey Jones’s plays seem to take place under a strobe light: brilliant flashes of deflated pop culture icons that slowly accumulate into a bitter satire of the emptiness and loneliness of our culture. They are imaginary fun houses with real monsters lurking in the crooked corners … Every fragment of an emotion is immediately undercut, and when the smoke clears, the dominant impression is of a brilliant but ultimately self-involved vision, the work of a clever but naughty adolescent. The good qualities of Jones’s work are amply displayed in his latest post-modern vaudeville, THE ENDLESS ADVENTURES OF M C KAT, OR HOW THEY GOT FROM A TO B. It’s a lively concoction made all the more vibrant by the elastic and salty actors of the Cucaracha Theatre … proving you can be avant-garde without taking yourself too seriously. The kaleidoscopic plot interlaces several strands. The title character is a naughty little mongoose-like character with a squeaky voice portrayed by a stuffed animal — one of the many anti-illusionist jokes is that he hates being called a stuffed animal. The framing plot involves a playwright (all-too-self-consciously named Big Dick) wandering a small town in search of M C. All sorts of commentary about the longing for artistic, religious and other types of transcendence is thrashed about. Along the way we encounter a myriad of redneck types, from a lost sportscaster to a fat fundamentalist to a manic doctor who screams lectures at us about the value of stress reduction. As usual in Jones’s work, moment-to-moment the humor is bristling and the pacing is deft … the set is imaginative — a backdrop of a baseball field and a perversely angled pink-and-lime-green sportscaster’s booth that doubles as a puppet stage. And the cast sparkles. I particularly enjoyed Al Cima in a variety of finely distinguished small roles. M C Kat does indeed run the full gamut from A to B, taking a delightfully circuitous route.” —Robert Massa, The Village

“Cucaracha Theatre’s latest is the saga of M C Kat, meerkat extraordinaire, and his reluctant, sinus-afflicted friend, Dick Sorehead, as they traipse a Pop Americana landscape of quick draw cowboys, inbred towns, self-help TV, and ‘high-concept’ Mets games: ‘Let’s become one with the baseball inside us.’ Jeffrey Jones’ wonderful waddle through the vernacular imagination plays through April 27, at the Broome Street Theatre.” —Brian Parks, The Village Voice

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