STAGE REVIEW : ‘Snowball’s Chance’: A Chilling Message Beneath the Humor

Watch out. If you believe everything you read in the papers, you too could become this 100-year-old shrunken person, shuffling along in what looks, in the half-light, like a monk’s cassock, reading gibberish from an unraveling roll of toilet paper, a miner’s lamp on your forehead, regressing, regressing, regressing. . . .

That is the opening image of John Fleck’s “A Snowball’s Chance in Hell.” We’ll get back to that title, but, meanwhile, some background on this performance piece that opened Friday at Taper, Too in Hollywood.

It was to develop “Snowball” that the National Endowment for the Arts approved, and then removed, a $5,000 grant for Fleck. The incident rocketed him to national prominence as one of the notorious “NEA Four,” four artists (Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, Karen Finley and Fleck) deemed too hot to handle who had their funding reversed by an endowment in turmoil.

The Los Angeles Theatre Center offered to make good the money for the local contingent--Miller and Fleck--until it went under last October. But, with only a partial subsidy and abundant pluck, Fleck plowed on. What we get at Taper, Too is the result.

Very Samuel Beckett. Aside from the wizened reader regressed into childhood described above, Fleck delivers plenty of other images of unhealthy childhood, fear, cringing, loathing, spewing of food, foaming saliva, sighs and whistles and moans. An angry, redneck father and a recessive, squealing mother get at each other through the daily paper. He finds excuses to vent his bigotry; she finds small victories in money-saving coupons. Without this tool for survival and two-handed warfare, might they not kill?

Bigotry and the dysfunctional family (“What do you think repelled me into show business?”) are only two of Fleck’s targets. In a segment played to strains from the theme of “Love Story,” co-dependence guru John Bradshaw is as fair game as George Herbert Walker Bush. In another episode, Fleck makes a list of car parts and design models sound, well, provocatively pornographic.

Fleck exudes funny. He looks and moves funny. But his aim in “Snowball” is no laughing matter. The comic business is unsettling, the bantering with the audience laced with undercurrents that run deep. Regularly, he sinks back into media-driven fetal hangovers and stark primal terrors, garlanding himself with pages from magazines, strangling in ribbons of printed matter, cowering under his blanket as wave upon wave of feel-good buzz phrases and simplistic formulas for success undermine what’s left of his confidence.

“These messages,” booms a recorded voice, “will now become subliminal.” On several occasions, he goes through the motions of wiping off an invisible mirror to see who is, in fact, reflected there.

Fleck’s ultimate target is this insidiousness--the media’s perceived manipulation of our lives as it defines success with cultural cliches, co-opts our psyches and preys on our fears. A next-to-final image finds him in a catatonic state, lumbering across the stage, nearly naked and permanently attached to his bathroom mirror. He’s applying every advertised balm, salve and cosmetic panacea to his bewildered face. One last time, his hand moves to wipe off the media blitz so he can see himself.

But is anyone there?

It’s a startling close and Fleck--who single-handedly wrote, performed and staged the piece--has mostly himself to thank. Aside from the media itself, help came from consulting director Randee Trabitz, Nathan Birnbaum and Kevin Adams. The latter supplied the environment: stacks of newspapers, a rug, a chair, a sophisticated lighting scheme and that perambulating bathroom. The former provided the tongue-in-cheek musical score and at least one humorous lunge with “La Cumparsita.”

“A Snowball’s Chance in Hell” offers a minefield of interpretations, title included. Many may embrace the piece as proper vengeance on the power of the media that leaves no one “A Snowball’s Chance in Hell” to survive its distortions. This writer prefers to believe with Thomas Jefferson that a free press is our ticket to salvation. It did, after all, play a bit of a role last year in straightening out the National Endowment’s perceptions of artistic freedom.

Best to see this seriocomic diatribe as a skillful broadside on dangers and temptations--a warning on bending the truth for the sake of other agendas. Everyone benefits from being reminded that no one is immune to abuses of power. Not even the press.

‘A Snowball’s Chance in Hell’

A performance piece written, performed and staged by John Fleck. Producer Corey Beth Madden. Consulting director Randee Trabitz. Sets and lights Kevin Adams. Sound Nathan Birnbaum.