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The Face Off Unlimited comedic improv troupe comes at you like a surreal tornado, in their East Village based Japanese game-show BATSU!
Joe Tex, a mordant comic genius, Eric Robinson, a galvanizing stage presence who is a consummate master of frenzied unpredictability, and Jay Painter, whose sly witticisms and atmospheric guitar playing skillfully escalate the madness, form the heart of the troupe.
At JeBon on St. Marks Place on Monday nights, they are augmented by the satirically over the top Japanese game-show Host Kenji America, and the laser wielding Noriko Sato, the disciplinarian who instantaneously delivers the due justice to any performer who fails to meet with the crowd’s approval in this audience participation melee.
After all, “batsu”, roughly translated from the Japanese, means punishment, and if the audience feels the pain, even for a moment fugitively, the performers must feel it literally. Such are the terms of this riotous theatric transaction.
What stands out about Face Off Unlimited, beyond the crowd-pleasing hijinks at which they are so adept, is the lightning intelligence of their verbal forays into the uncharted terrain where logic and absurdity collide.
They inhabit this no man’s land through the use of theatre games, in which for example the audience shouts out “painter”, “elephant”, or any other kind of animal, which is then used as a premise for a scenario that rapidly comes to defy any preconceived expectations of linearity, as the performers riff like a high speed internet connection, creating an improvised verbal mosaic too zany to recount without violating the spiritedness of the action.
Highlights included “Household Olympics”, in which a common activity serves as the basis for an impromptu skit; “School Yard Insults”, in which the players who don’t guess the correct word, get the laser jolt from the appropriately flamboyant, well cast mistress of pain (the above mentioned Noriko Sato); the on the spot story inventions during which the slightest hesitation or stumble from a performer elicited friendly cat calls, guffaws, and cries of “BATSU!” were another occasion of hilarity, made all the more so by the accompanying good natured administration of the punishment.
The intentional absurdity of the fatuous, posturing wrestler decked out collegiate style, and the hyperbolic, fluttering insanity of the chicken suited run-on, provided still more memorable moments of raucousness in this bacchanal of belly laughs.
A word must also be said about Matt Samardge who operated the soundboard and used the lights to great advantage. His intelligent engineering created a highly effective counterpoint to the performers’ subtlest thrusts, as well as their wildest juxtapositions.
Face Off Unlimited, already an entertainment institution out on Port Jefferson, Long Island where they have done a weekly Friday night show for years, has more recently based itself in Astoria and give enthusiastically received classes in comedic improvisation at The Secret Theatre in Long Island City. In addition Face Off Unlimited is creating a fierce buzz on the college circuit. The troupe is an engaging unit clearly destined to reach a wider audience.
