Dummies is easily one of the best works of theatre I saw all year [2009]. It is raw, open, messy, polyvocal, poetic, and completely insane, unravelling before our eyes (and ears) all the indecipherable codes and speech patterns that transpire from the City to our kitchen sinks, and the operating table to the lecture hall. It repurposes banana peels and garbles machinic language, to produce a frightfully lucid depiction of the madness of corporate cultures, work life, and play, in an act of creativity that recalls Joyce, Artaud, Carroll, and the grand traditions of bunraku puppetry. Not quite clown, and not quite performance art, it occupies a space between high and low art, folk and the avant-garde, slipping between worlds faster than it can pause to mop up the mess that was left in the scene before. Truly delightful.
