Something or something and you are the sun

Nature Theater of Oklahoma—despite the Kafka reference, they're actually from New York City—pitches its tent in Columbus again to perform a pair of offbeat shows in a pair of intimate theater spaces. First up is Romeo and Juliet, whose script is taken from amusingly off-kilter retellings of the plot of the Shakespeare play (May 18–20 in the Black Box on Mershon Stage); later in the week is Rambo Solo, in which one man acts out (onstage and onscreen) his obsession for Vietnam vet John Rambo in First Blood (May 21–23 in the Performance Space). Take advantage of this weeklong stay: These shows mark the only performances in the U.S. outside of New York at this point. (Both shows were co-produced by the Wexner Center with several partners overseas.)

Racking up extensive media coverage from Variety, the New Yorker, and the Village Voice to name just a few, the award-winning Nature Theater brings a signature do-it-yourself aesthetic, with scripts often based on casual conversations and laced with plenty of humor. (The group itself has an informal tagline: “putting the ‘w' in mellowdrama since 1995.”) Theater critic Charles Isherwood, who reviewed both shows for the New York Times last year, wrote that Romeo and Juliet is a “flat-out hilarious riff on that revered classic,” a “daffy entertainment and a subtle exploration of the slippery nature of our cultural memory, an X-ray that reminds us how little we sometimes know about the things we think we know. (Or think we should know, anyway.) Expect to be in floods of teary laughter midway through.” And Alexis Soloski of the Village Voice notes that “actors Anne Gridley and Robert M. Johanson (dressed in tight-fitting, semi-Elizabethan drag) milk plentiful laughs from their exaggerated delivery of quotidian dialogue, waving their arms and screwing up their faces as they utter, ‘Something or something and you are the sun!'”

Isherwood and Soloski also weighed in on Rambo Solo; Isherwood notes that the show is full of “weird pleasures” and is a “winking shard of low-concept theater for downtown hipsters,” while Soloski calls it a “poignant and jocular performance piece.” And Variety writes that “Nature Theater of Oklahoma, which has forged a sharp, witty and utterly distinctive performance style from elements charitably called garbage, has hit the mother lode in Rambo Solo.” Meanwhile, Hilton Als of the New Yorker (and an essayist for our Mark Bradford catalogue, by the way) writes a thoughtful review, noting that “the piece is…inevitably, about language”; he was especially was taken with the final touch at the end of the show, “when the lights go down and they perform, unseen, the famous balcony scene from Act II of Romeo and Juliet.” It's then, he writes, that audiences register “both the language and the depth of feeling in it.” O Romeo. We will be there.