KLÜB is very funny at times, blending pathos, Grand Guignol and surrealistic nonsense into an anxious gestalt of over-the-top, exuberantly performed characters. A washed-up actor with a surgically-created blowhard, a bitter clown, a suicide-obsessed mime, a brother act, an Orphan Annie version of Baby Jane, Annie’s long-suffering sister, a man who drinks toxic chemicals and regurgitates celebrity perfumes, a melodramatic seer; characters that are often just hysterical gags, though a few achieve intelligible drama.

A Double Ending

Playwright Mitch Watson, then, crafts a nihilistic scenario. Nothing means anything, nothing matters. The director is making it up as he goes along and the performers are merely being strung along an endless roller coaster of existential angst. It’s all rather classic stuff, if a bit bourgeois in that re-stating an old problem doesn’t really count as confronting it. To throw audiences into the bottomless end of the philosophical pool, Watson opts for a double-ending. The first, equivalent to taking the god out of deus ex machine, is entirely sensible given the play’s premise of actors compelled to set aside the mask of their performances to acknowledge their true selves. But for all the rich material, allegorical and dramatic, to be had in this ending, Watson has to toss it all aside to provide yet another twist that not only takes god out of the machine, but takes the machine out of the machine. In one fell swoop, KLÜB is not so much existential but on the solipsistic side of nihilism. Like Keiser Soze at the end of The Usual Suspects, KLÜB leaves only doubt – that old boor – in its wake.

The philosophical knots are interesting, to be sure, in that they give KLÜB the delicious thrill that only clever experimental art can. But they are also nothing that a good reading of Nietzsche can’t cure. Like the endlessly irritating what-is-real? debate that plagues the last two films of the Matrix trilogy, the how-do-we-escape-KLÜB? issue is ultimately overbaked. KLÜB ends up saying that nothing can be said (or meaning that nothing can be meant). Not even the existential despair of characters trapped in an endlessly looping performance can be trusted, which makes the whole production an intellectual exercise without much blood pumping in its heart. The program invites comparisons to Sartre’s No Exit – for unsurprising reasons involving, well, the lack of an exit – but the comparison to Sartre’s vehicle for observing that hell is other people also highlights KLÜB’s shortcomings.

Provoking thought is arguably the point, as is leaving the audience in an unbalanced position. It doesn’t quite convince, but the best thing about productions put on by The Actor’s Gang is that however much a given piece’s success can be questioned, a very rare thing in general, the theatrical experience in itself is always magic.