Tina Satter's wonderfully weird play In The Pony Palace/FOOTBALL uses imaginative wordplay, quirky choreography, and marching band dance music to explore the passion and absurdity often associated with high school football. Our heroes are The Owls, an all-girl team with a lot of heart and dedication, and a sad mascot who sometimes fills in as linebacker on game day.
The show begins with two somber cheerleaders wheeling out a movie screen, on which is projected a music video starring two gal pals blissfully rolling around Brooklyn on their long boards. What the video has to do with girls' high school football is anyone's guess, but what's so refreshing about Satter's work is that it defies classification and revels in surprising idiosyncrasies (though the tone remains consistent). Mac Wellman's hyper-linguistic, defiantly anti-narrative style seems to be an influence, but while the dialogue in "Pony Palace" can be gnomic, it's never so inscrutable that it alienates you. The cheerleaders and players speak in an idiom that has one foot in adolescent slang, and another in Satter's inspired, elusive absurdity. "I have a soft spot for those tiny little horses that live under the lockers," one of the jocks confesses late in the show. "They have beautiful manes." Satter's muse is mystifying, but never boring or pretentious.
The 60-minute romp riffs on the plot points of teen sports movies—the new quarterback with the jittery nerves, the big game against the Panthers ("It doesn't to be pretty," says the coach. "It just has to be Owl football."), the surprise win, the revelry that costs them the next big game, the perseverance in the wake of devastating defeat. On a simple football field stage, Satter gets the most out of her talented ensemble, choreographing hilarious game day montages and rowdy party scenes, set to music by a four piece marching band playing Chris Giarmo and Bobby McElver's clever, pop-inflected score. How refreshing to experience an hour of theater that you just can't pigeonhole, that makes "sense" aesthetically but not literally. Go see Satter and her company, Half Straddle, score touchdowns and dance eccentrically in the end zone.
In The Pony Palace/FOOTBALL continues through February 26th at The Bushwick Starr.
