Arts Review

La Putain Avec les Fleurs

Salvage Vanguard Theater and Monarch Event Center,

through Dec. 1

Running Time: 1 hr, 20 min

While printing the title of La Putain Avec les Fleurs in English might be acceptable under today's publishing standards, doing so would mislead. This RoHo Theatre Company presentation doesn't aim to provoke or offend but to entertain, and it does exactly that, more often than not. In addition to implying a perhaps controversial idea, printing the title wouldn't encapsulate what the production actually is: a French clown show. Certainly, you can glean French from the title above, but you can't glean clown.

The show has a subtitle, as well – A Junk Melodrama – and it's appropriate that the play has two titles, because it's really a play-within-a-play – sort of. A French theatre company, Theatre des Funambules, has come to town to put on their clown show, which is about a man named Baptiste, a performer of the highest stature. Despite his success, Baptiste has grown weary of being a clown, so he goes on a search for meaning. He tries marriage, tries working a regular job, even tries becoming a monk (and does pretty well at it), until one day he returns to the theatre and finds that an old friend, another clown, has taken ill.

Directed by Rocky Hopson and filled with exactly what you would expect in a clown show – actors in whiteface, mime, shadow puppets, string puppets, broad physical humor, even a live sequence that, with the help of a strobe light, looks like a silent film – the entire production seems to emerge from a rather large box, which morphs into many more than a few different things (and on one occasion is just a box but a box containing a surprising, disturbing thing). The most entertaining thing about the show is the actors. Rob Houle not only composed the music, played by a threepiece band that accompanies the show from beginning to end but also plays the narrator, Tabarin. With his bowler hat, pencil-thin mustache, and ever-present accordion, Houle delivers every line and note with an irony that would make Jack Nicholson envious. And for some reason that entirely escapes me, listening to an entire cast of actors speak in French accents is eminently pleasurable. Especially when they use the phrase "big French bear" (yes, there is a big French bear in the show). And even when one of those accents might, on occasion, sound Italian. Or even Hispanic.

Unlike any other Austin production in my memory, the current run of La Putain is playing at six different venues around the city. In an unfortunate circumstance, I could only attend a show at Beerland, on Seventh and Red River. While Beerland's ambience was generally quite appropriate, the noise of bands playing at nearby venues emerged through the walls and did nothing but distract and sometimes obscure the voices of the actors, particularly when they were singing. The production's remaining shows are at Salvage Vanguard Theater and the Monarch Event Center, either of which will prove a more appropriate venue for this quite distracting exercise in clowning.