Mason West for the Emerald
Joe VonAppen recounts a glue-induced vision of being led through forests of velvet leaves and velour grass on the way to heaven.
Playhouse swears at God
■ Swearing at God’ opens in
the Playhouse today as a
showcase for Joe VonAppen,
though he falls a little short
Pocket Playhouse
‘Swearing at God’
★★★☆☆
By Mason West
for the Emerald
As the end of the 2000-01 Pocket
Playhouse season approaches, Joe
VonAppen asks, “What does it all
mean?” This crucial question is
what centers his self-written, self
directed one-rfian show, “Swearing
at God,” which opens in the Pocket
today at 5 p.m.
The play is a series of monologues
that VonAppen appropriately calls
“schizophrenic,” but all the charac
ters are struggling to find meaning in
their existence. As the title suggests,
the play does deal with some heav
enly aspects, but it is by no means re
ligious or religiously offensive.
“God” is really just an entity to
whom we address life’s big question.
VonAppen assumes all people
are searching for meaning in life,
but he theorizes that all people ac
tually experience it at some point.
However, the experience is too brief
for them to comprehend the mean
ing. Thus, people replace the ques
tion “what does it mean?” with
“what the fuck?”
Basically, the audience is prepped
from the beginning to understand
the end of the show. VonAppen,
wisely, doesn’t offer any answers to
his questions; all the characters come
up short. While this leaves audi
ences a little unfulfilled, it is much
better than VonAppen trying to pro
pose some meaningful answer that is
complete crap. Expecting one man to
resolve the human condition causes
theater to be pretentious.
While VonAppen stays humble,
his schtick gets old. Anyone who
spends an hour and a half vocally
questioning existence is bound to
seem cranky. He holds out longer
than you might expect by taking hu
morous approaches vto asking the
question. His first search is made by a
wannabe gangster taking night class
es in foreign languages — he has al
ready mastered the four-letter dialect
of English. The endeavor is to find the
language God spoke in during a vi
sion induced by huffing glue. This is
perhaps the funniest of the mono
logues and contributes to the disap
pointment in later aspects of the play.
In contrast to the rapid-fire slang
spouted by “homie” Joe, VonAp
pen later becomes more reserved as
a scorned ventriloquist whose
dummy won’t speak to him be
cause it has emotional problems
and wants to die. Later still, he is
“the revolutionary leader of ab
solutely nothing.”
After doing a successful job of bal
ancing humor and melancholy, Von
Appen drops the ball with the last
two monologues. While he doesn’t
lead audiences to expect a happy
ending, they won’t be pleased or sat
isfied with what is presented. That is
the bad side of not having a preten
tious answer; there’s nothing on
which to pass judgment. At least
when actors go out on a limb, view
ers can leave saying “dude, they are
so wrong” and feeling superior.
Well, kudos to VonAppen for not
giving audiences that chance.
So, what does it all mean? People
who will want to attend this play
are the same people who watched
the film, “Requiem for a Dream”;
they aren’t looking for answers or
emotional pleasure, they just want
to experience someone’s art. It’s un
clear whether this show is art; it
didn’t have Jennifer Connelly in it.
“Swearing at God” plays today
and Saturday at 5 p.m. in the Pock
et Playhouse in Villard Hall.
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