Omnivorous Kind Reveals Truth
By Chris Meyer
A&F Associate

The lights of the large studio at Seaver Theater dim to hush the audience. In the midst of the silence appears a conductor, who bows, then turns around to begin conducting an imaginary symphony. Another actress appears on stage, reading aloud from a list of terms which might each describe humanity at its lowest. "Unsurity. Pain. Anger. Fear. Dishevelment," she intones, and suddenly the scene feels eerily similar to something that weird Goth kid in tenth grade English class would have created. But then a cheery mountain climber enters and places himself at center stage, staring out into the audience with a look of contentment on his face. With that, the mood diffuses and the other characters leave, replaced by an off-stage climbing buddy who seems to have lost his toilet paper.

A transition like this isn't uncommon in the recent drama production Omnivorous Kind and the Stages of Life, performed at Pomona College and funded by ASCMC and the Druid's Bottom Line Theatre. Completely student-created and student-produced, the play was written and directed by Raza Ahmad CMC '04 and featured a cast and crew from Pomona, CMC, Scripps and Pitzer colleges. Being a student play, it wasn't without its quirks, though the all-around quality of both the acting and the material gave the piece a life all its own.

Omnivorous Kind walks a thin line between existentialist angst and surreal humor; luckily, it keeps the balance right most of the time, delivering interesting glimpses into a seemingly chaotic world that isn't too far removed from our own. The cast of twelve have no singular identities within the piece, but play the parts of several characters over nine vignettes. Things begin innocently enough with the mountain climbers, and the following scene with young adults daydreaming in Sarajevo; but suddenly an off-stage explosion rocks the set and the stunned Bosnians don't even have time to react before they're rushed off the stage by the cast and crew of the next sequence, and here things become more sinister. A game show begins in which noted celebrity Edmund B. Smidgened asks questions of his young charge Dougie, who sits in a chair facing away from the audience. As Dougie continues making mistakes, Smidgened straps him into his chair and begins delivering electrical shocks to Dougie's testicles until he can produce the correct answer. This correct answer is "there are no people living in Africa," though it turns out Smidgened is wrong, so in order to save face he has a flunky call the President and order the continent's extermination, which is carried out immediately. From here the scene switches to another television show, this one a news program: amidst inexplicable war and corporate swelling, Satan has apparently come to ravage Earth, though luckily "two armed preschoolers on their way to massacre their classmates came across the towering giant and showed him what they really teach in school," the anchor reports. He's then joined by a veritable troika of society's worst creations: a blockheaded militarist, a paranoid intellectual (more specifically a "Professor of Corrected Fact," one of my favorite nuances) and a xenophobic reverend, all of whom weigh in on the degradation of society. None of the three can make anything near a valid point, however, finally prompting the anchor to scream "are you even listening to yourselves??"

These two scenes show Omnivorous Kind at its very best and most biting, along with a 21st century vaudeville scene where two hagglers taunt a mild-mannered medical student, inciting him to start a fight onstage and succumb to the numbing bluntness that characterizes so much of society today. Also included are two more slowly-paced scenes, one a tri-lingual interview in which nobody understands anyone else, and the other a father's lamentation over finding monetary success but losing his child. Though they disrupt the energy of the performance's earlier numbers, these are integral to the whole and offer a down-to-earth foil to the extremities of the earlier vignettes.

The final scene takes place in an office of unknown location and purpose, which a young man enters but soon finds he won't be able to leave the way he came in. Interestingly enough this young man is played by the same actor who, as a mountain climber in the first scene, muses "what if I suddenly died up here?" And then the vignettes begin to really come together, as a laundry list of reasons not to live with humanity anymore: intolerance, greed, disrespect, chaos, etc. The connections are there, but not all are at first evident; if there's a problem with Omnivorous Kind, it's that it might be taking too much on for one hour of stage time. This is, of course, not as bad as, say, taking on too little in a three-hour piece; it basically means the play demands repeat viewings in order to understand its complexities, which is not necessarily a drawback. Omnivorous Kind is at times challenging, depressing and humorous, sometimes all at once; by and large it succeeds, and the cast and crew should be proud of their substantial efforts that went into making the play one to remember.