BWW Reviews: THE FLOATONES Please, at La MaMa

It was a sold-out show. That's saying a lot. The Floatones were last seen at La MaMa twenty years ago.

La crème of New York theatergoers, thespians, directors, playwrights and respective crewmembers endured the untimely passing of Jim Neu five years ago. He was the challenging, shameless voice of reason for late 20th century experimental downtown theater.

And the crowd mostly represented those who knew the Neu heyday when it was...new. Yes, it still is! Neu is still as new as he always...is. This truth could be heard, as the loudest laughter cackled brilliantly from the youngest persons in the audience.

La MaMa is over fifty, and looks as fresh as a 2015 spring chicken. Nothing of the over-the-hill, motivational makeover blasé could be seen. Set, lighting, costume, the reproduction was retro-reenacted punctiliously.

The actors doubled as vocalists, and tripled as dancers, and quadrupled as themselves, rocking the showboat with light speed theatrical ingenuity. All of the favorite existential pomp of Jim Neu's dialectical voice swung left hooks, homeruns and little seats over the beach.

This original comedy is one for the books, if only there was a story. It's theater, as only theater could be, at its most authentic, modern, and real, all-too-real.

Musing on themes of personhood, and togetherness, this is a dramatic anthem that continues to resound into the 21st century. The Floatones play a song, and sing an act of urban solitude set against the artist collective's inspirational ebullience.

Neu's in the spirit of such philosophically rich celluloid tragicomedies as David O. Russel's I Heart Huckabees and Woody Allen's anything, or even darker literary treatments in the vein, such as Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club or Saul Bellow's Herzog.

Yet, as nothing else, The Floatones carried their tune gorgeously, and humanly, before the spotlight flickered over the first scene until the very last nonverbal joke. The cosmic joke, that is, the one that never ends, and always begins, like some stubborn mule plodding along, lost somewhere on the cracked cobblestone alleyways of the borough.

(That's Neu, now forever late, as we bask in his immortally staged glories without him, sadly, though not sparing the uncontrollable laughter he so warmly gave to us all.)

Photo by Victoria Sendra