An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein
Skinner Studio
1714 Delancey Place
Philadelphia
Seen March 10
Showing March 10 - March 14
Buy tickets here
“If you are a dreamer, come in. If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, a hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer… if you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire. For we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in! Come in!”
That’s the generous introduction to Shel Silverstein’s famed poetry collection, Where the Sidewalk Ends. Silverstein was hailed for his Seussical verses and profound children’s stories. His roles as a staff writer for Playboy, a songwriter of ballads like “Freakin’ at the Freakers Ball,” and a creator of creepy alternate personas like “Uncle Shelby” are biographical details that tend to live in the margins of his public memory.
What separates his G-rated writing from a more “grown-up” sense of humor is made clear in An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein. That’s a collection of short skits written by Silverstein compiled into a play that Philly community theater group Casabuena Cultural Productions is offering a special staging of this week inside Skinner Studio.
The comedy sketches are something akin to bad confessional fiction. Whereas his children’s stories are unfaltering reflections on the human condition, his cabaret-style parodies are, ironically, a set of ill-timed temper tantrums. That’s probably the whole point.
The scripted short stories range widely in their portraiture of disgruntled individuals: A crew of societal rejects physically threaten the man who coined the phrase “Have a nice day.” A dad pranks his daughter mercilessly on her birthday. A blind man guilts the world’s only talking dog into remaining his untalented rescue pet.
The dirtiness of the show stems less from the specificity of the language used — though there is a synonym battle in which a man and women duel over the gnarliest words to describe each other’s reproductive body parts — than it does from the darkness of societal devolution.
Every one of these characters is unlikeable: All they do is spew out verbose lines of self-defense. One implication is that growing up, in essence, is about taking up language as a means of pitiful protection against a dominant culture of violence, fragility and, ultimately, absurdity.
But the more obvious inference is that Playboy Silverstein was not always wielding his words to articulate the nuances of humanity. Sometimes the point was just to elicit or express a reaction.
These experimental word dumps designed for the stage might be considered his most counter-cultural works. He is aiming to entertain audiences on the outskirts, which at the time must have included himself. To be self-indulgent — to engage in sprawling, sometimes solipsistic art for the sake of it — can also be considered a kind of underground way of going against the grain.
In the small cabaret attic where the show was staged, it was at times hard to hear the actors' well-practiced, tongue twisting performances through the unhinged and often obnoxious laughter coming from the miniature crowd. It reminded me that lawless territory is not always the best place to be. Sometimes it's just super annoying.
It's also likely why the best bit of the play was actually a song, controlled at least in part by rhythm and harmony. “Buy One, Get One Free,” is a ballad of two prostitutes dealing their services, until a pretentious guy accuses them of bullshitting him: “You double the price originally/ then you hype up the commodity/ with a lot of sweet banalities/ to play upon our vanities/ all that 'double electricity'/ ain’t nothing but duplicity/ you’re banking on the culpability/ of the uneducated community/ and you do it with impunity/ but that don’t work with a dude like me/ a holder of a Ph.D. degree/ from an Ivy League University/ Where I majored in economy.”
The situation escalates with one woman responding: “Have you no shred of decency/ to speak so disrespectfully/ to two sweet creatures such as we/ two pillars of the community/ who have contributed significantly/ to this community’s economy/ both holders of Ph.D. degrees/ In phys. ed and economy.”
… “Find yourself some chimpanzee/ with a crack-crazed pimp and some bad V.D./ and I hope she gives you H.I.V./ and puts your motherfuckin’ ass in the cemetery.”
The pair get so furious that they relent on the rhyme scheme to curse their intended patron out and threaten him with a knife — but then calm themselves down by recalling the rule at hand: Everything has to end with “ee.”
A childhood lack of control is imaginative and innocent. Kids have the potential to be anything: “A dreamer, a wisher, a liar, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer.”
In the adult world, that same lack of control loses its wonder. We become the garbage media we’ve consumed and regurgitated. Words become toys ripe for manipulation.
That’s why I’d rather return to Silverstein’s classics. If we’re going to play pretend, there’s more give to be found in the slow, searching idealism of his children’s books than in the racing rut of his odes to reality: “Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow, and we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go, for the children, they mark, and the children, they know, the place where the sidewalk ends.”
