"You can easily spot thc trained clowns in a New Bozena audience,' David Costabile explains during a rehearsal of thc troupes first "slacker vaudeville,' set to open on Halloween at the Cherry Lane Theater. "They're thc ones sitting in thc back with their arms folded, frowning." Costabile and his fellow NYU grad students Michael Dahlen, Kevin Isola, and director Rainn Wilson have been known to run roughshod over the strict rules of clowning as set forth by, say, the French clown school Le Coq. Why? Because they don't know the rules, and think thceones they do know are stupid. "Some people take it really seriously,' Dahlen says. "One trained clown told us, 'It was very good, but you know you can't have three red noses on stage at once. You can't have clowns that don't talk and then start talking. And you have to have conflict between clowns, they have to try to show each other up.' " Isola feels the group shares a different sort of tension. "Our conflict is between the clowns."
first. They assume that the clock radio that awakens them with a Latin number is alive. It brings joy into their lives (in the form of a dance number) and then "dics" when Ramon (Costabile) accidentally kicks thc plug out. Naturally, they have a funeral for it. "Then it resurrects," Costabile reflects. "It's sort of Christian."
If they're bad with appliances, they're worse with employers. Ramon has enormous difficulty spreading a tablecloth at his restaurant; Spiv Westenberg (Dahlen) dodges a shower of No. 2 pencils; and most disturbingly funny, Isola's horned Revllallavoon Sahoallallaladoall (no relation) learns to perform open-heart surgery by trial and error. They somehow end up auditioning for a Chekhovian play to be performed in the original Albanian. Thc auditioner asks Ramon to diSSlrnt''tr :lf target by head-butting a smokcd ham. Spiv and Rcv also get to perform a scene and song from a musical called Cousin Bunny Chest Finds a Spicy Branch Toad. They're common Gcn-X tropes, these plays within plays, the simultaneous satirizing and embrace of cluelessness, the absurdity, the cartoon aesdletic but dammit I'm still laughing.
''Ulthllately, it's just really silly, dumb choreograplly," Wilson says. Aside from the occasional dismemberment and oblique references to incest and bestiality, the Bozena, named for a waitress and not an irregular plural of Bozo, shy away from the dark stuff. "One of the rules we've come up with is 'nothing sexual,' " Dahlen says. "You can't see clown butt, no clown humping, and no taking a dump. Wc tried this one routine where I was shitting and I actually pulled down my pants part way. Every time I did that, it became instantly not funny." Wilson agrees that it's just clean fun. "This is just like, 'Hey kids,