SLAMPOONED!: Single Carrot Skewers Slam Poetry

To the uninitiated—or to those who simply don’t get it (in which group I count myself)—a poetry slam might already seem like parody.  I can’t claim to understand slam culture beyond the stereotypes—which of course means that I don’t understand it at all—but the few slams I have attended (mostly in college or its immediate aftermath) have fit the mold pretty well: a dark room full of poets—earnest, ironic, agitated, celebratory, political, confessional—competing to see who could deliver the edgiest poem in the manner most approximating a sophisticated rapper.

In other words, for people such as myself, Single Carrot Theatre’s latest production, Slampooned!, which is being billed as “a side-splitting roast” of poetry slams and the poets who attend them, might seem a bit redundant.  Which is why the most surprising thing about this very clever and sometimes hilarious comedy is how affectionately—even gently, for all the cursing—it treats the bumbling artistes at its core.

The cleverness of the show lies in its structure.  Set in 1991 at the Second Annual National Poetry Slam, Slampooned! kicks things off with the entrance of the event’s MC, one “Popcorn” Jones (Brendan Ragan), who outlines the rules for the slam and appoints five members of the audience judges.

“Popcorn” then calls onto the stage a “sacrificial” poet (Nathan A. Cooper) to deliver a practice piece so that the judges can “calibrate” themselves.  This is the first inkling of the challenges facing the Slampooned! team.  To my (admittedly inexperienced) ears, Cooper’s poem was so skillfully written, his delivery so dead on, the performance was less a roasting of slam poetry than a replication of it.  As a result, I didn’t laugh so much as marvel at his skill—similar to a brilliant impressionist whose mimicry eclipses his material.

The first official performer is a young man named Ned Breastman (Elliott Rauh).  Ned is the nerdy type, complete with glasses and bowtie, and his poem, predictably, is about the perils of high school.  Rauh’s delivery is as crisp as Cooper’s, but his poem is more obviously parody; whereas Ragan and Cooper caused me to smile in recognition, Rauh made me laugh—hard—as did the next poet, Leah Collingsworth, who as played by Genevieve de Mahy (and costumed by Nathan Fulton, who does terrifically tacky work throughout) seems to be an arm-flailing, wide-eyed embodiment of amateurism.

But then a strange thing happens.  Leah’s poem, which had been straddling the line between hysterical and heartbreaking, tips decisively toward the latter, leaving a disquieting gap in the comic fabric of the show.  How should we respond to this unexpected turn?  Surely not by laughing … but then, are we not at a “side-splitting roast”?

Before we have time to dwell on these questions, Slampooned! withdraws the ace from its sleeve—we are not watching a 90-minute procession of satirical slams (thankfully) but an honest-to-God play.  The protagonists are the members of an up-and-coming team of slammers from tiny Mackinaw City, Michigan, and the play intersperses their journey to Chicago to compete in the National Poetry Slam with performances from the competition, both theirs and their opponents’.

In addition to Leah, the Mackinaw team includes two poets whose names, unfortunately, I did not catch (the program does not help on this point, but they are memorably played by Rauh and Jessica Garrett), and the co-captain and owner of one of the funniest names in the history of fake slam poetry, Shane Fluidge (Ragan again).  Many of the funniest moments concern the attempts of a periodically unbalanced Vietnam veteran named Larry (Cooper again) to join the team.  Larry’s most valuable assets are a van that holds five people and a knack for dirty (if not always syllabically-correct) haiku.

The five actors cycle smoothly from role to role, though not every characterization is equally precise, and many of the poets and poems not directly related to the Mackinaw plot begin to blend together.  Director Aldo Pantoja does a nice job utilizing every corner of Joey Bromfield’s flexible set design­—which incorporates everything from Larry’s cramped van to an ingeniously used live-video feed—and he generally keeps the pace up-tempo.

Still, several scenes toward the end could benefit from a pruning, especially one that introduces the inventor of the poetry slam, Marc Smith.  (Garrett’s portrayal of Smith is the only performance in the show that could be described as bland.)  For all that, I found the ending—which could go in several directions, depending on the votes of the judges at a particular performance—surprisingly abrupt.  At the very least, I felt Pantoja and his actors owed us one final scene in which the Mackinaw team responds to their fate on any given night.  It would require some improvisation and a healthy dose of risk, but if successful, it would provide the perfect capper to a show that continually defied my expectations—and, more often than not, made me very glad to be so defied.  Sitting through a slam has never been so much fun.

Slampooned! is playing at Single Carrot Theatre, located at 120 W. North Avenue in Baltimore, on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 PM, and Sundays at 2:30 PM, through August 2^nd. Tickets are $10-$15. For more information, visit www.singlecarrot.com or call 443-844-9253.