By Johnnie Walker

When Antonin Artaud wrote Theatre and Its Double, the manifesto for his so-called Theatre of Cruelty, he called for the actors to bleed on the audience as well as a bunch of other things that are probably best left interpreted metaphorically. Surely, Glen Callendar’s Transcendental Masturbation, now playing at the Fringe, was not exactly what he had in mind? During last night’s performance, during a “peeling” joke gone awry, Callendar wound up removing not just the skin of a carrot over top of alarmed audience members, but also a not-small chunk of his finger, which soon started to bleed somewhat prodigiously. Ever the trooper, Callendar decided to keep going with his oddball one-man comedy act, thanks to a few nervous Fringe volunteers who were willing to run around looking for paper towels and gauze. By the time the show ended, the piece of finger had yet to be found.
Even without that one gruesome detail, Callendar’s sometimes funny, sometimes only bizarre show plays out like a nightmare come to life. Jokes would generate a mixture of laughter and groans of revulsion. One lengthy sequence involving his playing a Casio while singing a series of songs in a terrible British accent is painfully tedious. He claimed that his injured finger marred his keyboard playing, but unfortunately, it didn’t sound much worse than it did before he circumcised his pinkie. The climax of the show is an anthem about the joys of being a bisexual man. It will likely make you leave the theatre thinking bisexuals are greedy, lecherous creeps (if you didn’t already); it would probably take an entire season of Torchwood to undo the damage. At the end of the day, the show comes up somewhat short on the transcendental side. But there’s certainly loads of masturbation.
Today’s 2 p.m. performance of Transcendental Masturbation is cancelled, but a final performance is scheduled for Saturday at 3:30 p.m.
More Fringe today:
The Movies (abridged) is a very Fringe-sounding show playing tonight at the Passe Muraille mainspace at 8:00 p.m. The film-parody fest is by the same people who came up with the popular The Bible (abridged). Meanwhile, at the same place at 12:30 p.m. you could see It’s Just a Phase, a comedy about a mother trying to “straighten out” her lesbian daughter.
Photo by Glen Callendar.