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’.
