Suspendered Animation

THWAK! through Sept. 23, State Theater, 719 Congress. Call 469-SHOW.

You ever see a dog explode? Like in midair, above your head, while you're sitting among a large audience in a big theatre and wondering what the hell's gonna happen next? The two scrawny Australian guys onstage -- Shane Dundas and David Collins, aka the Umbilical Brothers -- will gleefully provide this experience for you.

Okay, so it's not a real dog. Yes, it's an imaginary dog. But with the astonishing sound effects provided by Dundas and the precise movements perpetrated by Collins in their current show, THWAK!, you may find yourself involuntarily flinching away from gobbets of earthbound Fido. Kind of how you might normally flinch away from anything resembling mime. But don't confuse the Umbilical Brothers with that.

"We -- like everyone else -- find mime a little tedious, a little dull," says Dundas. "So we make fun of it, all that old-fashioned and traditional stuff. But we make fun of each other, too. We put shit on each other all the time."

"Yeah," agrees Collins. "We put shit on ... " He pauses, frowns. "Is that, em, what's the American term for that? When you make fun of something? Do you, what, you hang shit on it? You ... "

"You give it shit," I supply.

"Yeah, that's it -- that's it. We give everything shit." And they do, too -- brilliant shit -- but some things are targeted more often than others: classic cartoons, lounge singers, steroidal action men, chopsocky movies, fluffy little bunnies. Fluffy little bunnies? Well, that depends on availability.

"Our props are gone," says Collins, shaking his head ruefully. The Umbilical Brothers came to Austin for the first stop on their current tour; their luggage went to ... well ... "It's somewhere over the Atlantic, who knows where?" says Dundas. "British Airways has said they're not gonna find it. They pretty much said, 'Sorry, you're fucked.'"

But lost luggage isn't that difficult for these cut-ups to overcome: They don't use many props, really -- they are most of the props. Besides, they can always get by.

"We had to get new puppets," says Collins. "And we needed a particularly cute and fluffy puppet. A very fluffy puppet."

"The fluffier the better," says Dundas.

"The fluffier the better," agrees Collins. "Because something bad happens to it."

"Something very bad," says Dundas, grinning.

"Yeah," says Collins. "And we looked all over, we couldn't find the right kind of puppet. But Shane finally found something close. He found a toy, a stuffed animal. And we ripped its butt open ..."

"And now it's a puppet," finishes Dundas. "We ripped the stuffing right out -- I think there's still some on the stage."

"Yeah, it's right there," says Collins, pointing. "The remains of Mr. Fluffy."

What these guys did to a stuffed animal, they pretty much do to an audience's sense of reality. They're like cartoon characters come to life, like toons in living breathing 3D, with pratfalls and spit-takes and near-impossible contortions -- all accompanied by sound effects that an entire army of foley artists might pull off on a lucky day. As with the exploding dog, you can almost see the gang of infiltrators Dundas vocalizes into Collins' shaggy head, almost smell the Muppets -- Miss Piggy and an accidentally decapitated Kermit -- frying next to the shrimp on the barbie, almost taste the blood when a rogue housefly coldcocks Kung Fool Collins with a backhand smash. It's pop culture gone troppo. It's violence with a madman's grin.

"We're a bit uncategorizable," says Collins. "You can't really put us into a box."

But sometimes you can get a closer look at whatever's outside that box. At certain points in the show, whether it's in the Exploding Dog sequence or at the beginning of the Flipping-the-Bird Duel, the Umbilical Brothers will stop the action, reverse it, then move forward again in slo-mo or frame-by-frame. The word "uncanny" springs to mind, and numerous awards -- the Critics Choice at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the United Slapstick Award from Germany's Koln Comedy Festival -- have sprung to their shelves, propelled by amazement at such whacked-out talent. Is nothing physically sacred?

"What it comes down to," says Dundas, "is whoever has the mike has control of the show. Whoever has the mike creates the universe that the other one has to live in. And sometimes the other person doesn't like to be in that universe."

"It's a sort of sibling rivalry," says Collins. "There's a lot of that going on. We don't worry too much about narrative, though. Mostly it's the barest story, it's just a framework to hang all the laughs on. We really go for the laughs."

The sound of power saws fills the air. We're sitting in the middle of a row of seats in the Paramount Theatre, hours before these unrelated Brothers take the stage. Backstage there are people with power tools: building things, cutting things, raising an intermittent racket. Then, as suddenly as the noise began, there's silence from beyond the curtains. And in that sudden silence, David Collins gets a crafty look on his face. He stretches his lips and lets loose with what sounds precisely -- I can't emphasize this enough -- precisely like a band saw chewing through a two-by-four. Which he stops abruptly, then screams out in a pained Aussie accent: "Aaugh! My leg! Jesus, my leg! Someone ..."

A face peers out from behind the stage's thick curtains. "Hey!" shouts Collins. "Hey -- hello!" He laughs, pleased with himself. "Sorry!" he says. "That was -- I was ..."

"All right, David," says the man, shaking his head, trying not to smile. As if he's dealt with this sort of thing a few times since the Umbilicals hit town.

Shane Dundas grins at his crony. "Yeah," he tells me, "we definitely go for the laughs."