Escanaba In Da Moonlight 2006

Reviewed by Holly Bartges

John Ashton just can’t seem to leave well enough alone.

The cast of Escanaba in da Moonlight directed by John Ashton at the Aurora Fox.

A year ago he wrapped himself in a Jeff Daniels play at the Aurora Fox along with John Arp, Bill Hahn, Jack Casperson, Michael Morgan, and Dan Mundell, transformed the stage into a rustic hunting cabin just a mite down the road from Escanaba, Michigan and made people who normally don’t laugh out loud laugh themselves silly. With an A-1 exquisitely produced hilarious Escanaba In Da Moonlight.

And now he has gone and done it again.

By popular demand, The Aurora Fox brought it back. Could it be as funny the second time around so soon on the heels of last year’s blockbuster hit?

If anything, it’s funnier. That says a great deal coming from one who is so hard on comedy.

With the same astonishing cast, the same set designed by Michael Duran, and the same clothes (wonder if they were ever washed)?), and the same off-the-wall characters, although it seems they have dug deeper into the souls of these deer hunting men.

“Opening day o’ deer season. It’s like Christmas wit’ guns,” so says Albert Soady (Jack Casperson) as he primes the audience for an adventure back in 1989.

HOLY WHA!!! The Yoopers are back!

ThereÕs a crises in the UP (Upper Peninsula) in the tiny rustic cabin where Albert and his two sons who according to Albert “aren’t the sharpest saws in the shed.” John Arp morphs into Rueben and Michael Morgan into Remnar. 35-year-old Rueben has never missed a deer season. What he has missed is bagging a buck. The oldest Soady to hold the record and is known around town as the “Buckless Yooper.”

Albert frequently reminds the audience “there are some things you need to know” and one of those things is the UFOs. Bill Hahn explodes into the cabin as the tongue twisted Jimmer Negamanee from Menominee. Jimmer could flub his lines 20 times over and no one would ever know. Everything comes out backwards. Flap Jacks becomes Slap Jacks. He has good reason for his upside down words. One of the UFOs abducted him and he’s never been the same since.

The cast makes their characters more real than many who walk the streets and sit side by side with you at work.

Tradition rules the roost for hunting season and superstition guides their steps to ensure bagging a buck. Somewhere in his illogical brain, Reuben decides it’s the tradition that stands in his way. Instead of bringing the traditional pasties containing meat, potatoes, rutabagas, and lard, he brings a concoction created by his wife Wolf Moon Dance. Guest artists play her, and the night I was there it was Sally Clodfelter who sank her teeth deep into the play and with this one-of-a-kind cast.

Jimmer arrives after his car mysteriously catches fire and drives off without him. Their playing cards change numbers in their hands, Albert’s home made Sweet Sap whiskey turns to syrup, Remnar is convinced the camp is cursed running around the cabin citing incantations with a cross.

Babbling Tom T. Treado a Department of Natural Resources Ranger bursts into the cabin convinced because of a bright light he has seen God begins to undress singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot. Somewhere behind the babbling and the red and white shorts lives Dan Mundell, but in that character and on that stage it would be difficult to find him through his constant muddled, garbled lost-in-the-woods guise.

The scene that defies description and has to be a classic comedic projection comes when a brilliant light strikes Reuben and no one can wake him up. You have to see it to believe it. Any description would lose the translation turning it into something far grosser than what it actually is. Remnar’s expression when he wakes up is a picture worth a thousand and one words moving into a category all its own. Hysterical, frenzied, hilarious doesn’t begin to cover the actuality of the scene.

Playwright Daniels who wrote Dumb and Dumber, wanted “to write something for the theatre that makes people laugh as hard as they seem to be laughing at Dumb and Dumber.” From the trailers I saw, that one only made me curl my upper lip and say EH? As funny as the script for Escanaba In Da Moonlight is, the crux of the “funniness” depends upon a creative astute director and a cast endowed with artistic funny-bone expertise. With the proficient capability of this cast, it is impossible to imagine anyone anywhere anytime performing it any better.

Charles Dean Packard’s original lighting design of whirling white lights and flashing red explosions not only keeps the characters jumping but the audience on the edge of their seatsÑEh? All Yoopers end their sentences with EH? So they tell us.

Yoopers created their own language and their own concept of creation.

On da First day, God created da UP.
On da Second day, He created da partridge, da deer, da bear, da fish, and da ducks.
On da Third day, He said, “let dere be Yoopers to roam da Upper Peninsula.”
On da Fourth day, God created the udder world down below.
On da Fifth day, He said, “Let dere be trolls to live in the udder world down below.”
On da Sixth day, He created a bridge, so da trolls would have a way to get to heaven.
God saw it was good, and on da Seventh day, He went huntin’.

If you missed this production the first time around, don’t miss it this time. It’s comedic genius from start to finish, and remains one of the funniest plays I have ever witnessed. Escanaba In Da Moonlight contains the makings of becoming a tradition at The Aurora Fox as long as there is Ashton, Arp, Hahn, Casperson, and Morgan to explode the lines into brilliant hysteria.