THE GELDINGS
nytheatre.com review by Tim Cusack
August 15, 2003
The Freudian equivalent of a 90-minute
long fart joke (with neigh-ry a punch line in sight), The Geldings
could also equally be described as a horse opera, especially whenever
the cast deposits Wm Seebring’s limp penile one-liners on the stage. The
sheer volume of jokes having to do with the male member or lack thereof
makes for a perfect sandstorm of juvenility hitting the audience full in
the face. You see, all the men in the Gelding family have had their
peters shown to the Pearly Gates by Ma Gelding (played by a man in the
worst drag performance since Rudolph Giuiliani’s cross-dressing heyday)
for reasons having to do with the kind of religious fanaticism that only
exists in puerile comedy sketches and horror films. Add to that the
spectacle of women playing some of the men, and the opportunities for
the kind of lazy comic ironies found on late-night TV abound. Now if the idea of an entire show populated by castrati (and females) doesn’t appeal to you, than, dear reader, this is not the entertainment for you. However, if the idea of an entire show populated by castrati (and females) who then put small furry mammals down their pants in order to simulate intercourse with the local widowed brothel keeper is your idea of a hootenanny, than mount your steed pronto and git yerself down to the the-a-ter.
Other things happen in the play besides PETA nightmare scenarios—something about a drought and a lost girl who was raised to think she was a castrated boy and some desperado who turns out to be gay. However the production as a whole is so inept, that halfway through I gave up all pretense of paying attention to anything that was happening on stage. Instead I watched as the audience reverted to the behavior of seventh-graders at a particularly lame assembly.
