Fringe review: Lil Wenker – BANGTAIL
Featuring a high-noon showdown at an accounting firm, Lil Wenker – BANGTAIL cheekily reveals the absurdities of male ideals throughout history. ★★★★
Yes, that is the performer’s real name.
Lil Wenker – BANGTAIL is a ridiculously silly hour about the Baddest Cowboy in Texas finding love, losing everything, jumping into the future, joining corporate America, and wondering whether several lifetimes’ worth of manly posturing was worth it. BANGTAIL is the Minnesotan, London-based Wenker’s first year in Adelaide, and is a graduate from the two-year program at École Jacques Lecoq. For the uninitiated, the Lecoq school and its offshoots are largely responsible for what we might consider ‘contemporary clown’, the genre that features everything from Garry Starr to Complicite.
Wenker has studied with the best and is immensely pleasing to watch as she delivers her meticulously crafted, jaunty exploration of male archetypes. It should be said that this show may not suit a punter adverse to audience participation; director Cecily Nash has ensured the audience in the intimate Gallery venue are just as lit as Wenker throughout the performance, and thus Wenker invites the audience onstage to play characters (and objects) in the kooky worlds of her character, Bangtail. However, Bangtail is always comfortably the butt of the joke, and Wenker has a seemingly endless supply of magnetic energy and commitment to even the simplest of clown turns. This proves her confidence in her material, and whilst some moments can feel repetitive, it ensures we’re eagerly along for the ride through this deeply silly imaginative world.
BANGTAIL’s plot might best be described as functional, in that it enables much of the interactions between audiences and comedic sequences, logically following from Wenker’s intricate scene setting (complete with audience-generated sound effects) of the Wild West in the opening. The deconstruction of masculinity is limited to a degree by the show’s light-hearted and self-conscious tone, as some characters played by audience (like Mr. Nemesis, the antagonist) don’t seem to have just cause to dislike Bangtail. However, the play reaches a crescendo of absurdity in an office standoff right as the audience starts to wonder how this can all possibly resolve itself.
Lil(ian) Wenker’s first foray into the Adelaide Fringe is well-deserving of praise as a tightly packed, energising hour of ludicrous clown that questions the ideals of manhood that permeate our dreams. Thankfully though, there are more friendships than shootouts in BANGTAIL.
Lil Wenker: BANGTAIL continues at the Gallery in the Courtyard of Curiosities at Migration Museum until March 23
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