The Armadillo Necktie (Photo – Doug Engalla)
Another interesting play in the NoHo Arts District, this time at the Lonny Chapman Theater.
By Carol Edger Germain
Gus Krieger’s “The Armadillo Necktie,” directed by Drina Durazo, is playing through July 31. It is a twisting and turning disjointed snake of a story, and that is a compliment!
The general premise is that Colonel Ulysses S. Armadillo (Bert Emmett) is still in Iraq at the Afghanistan border decades after the Iraq war ended because he has unfinished business – tracking down the unidentified assassins who murdered his wife. It appears that after all this time his focus on finishing his mission has blurred and he’s mostly just living the bizarre life he has created for himself and his fellow soldier/caretaker/rescuer, Buckley Dunham (Matt Calloway), a career soldier perhaps meant to retrieve the Colonel but who has settled into the position of assisting and maintaining the Colonel in his bizarre lifepath, meanwhile enjoying his “me time” by knitting.
“The Armadillo Necktie” at Lonny Chapman Theater (Photo – Doug Engalla)
Time and birthdays seem to march forward and backward at their own pace throughout the play, with the Colonel aging by a decade every time he has occasion to mention his age, a fluid scene jumping forward randomly, keeping the audience a bit off kilter (which I liked). Weaving in and out of Armadillo and Dunham’s world are the three other characters in the play: New York Times reporter Madeline Sainz (Jennifer Laks), photographer Bruce Walker (Morgan Lauff), and a local citizen named Aminah Abdul-Haleem Ali (Shanti Ashanti). The New York times staff members have allegedly been sent to interview the notorious Colonel Armadillo, although Bruce has a sub-mission as well, which opens an opportunity for Buckley Dunham to exercise his penchant for torture, creating some dark laughs with his torture contraption hooked to a car battery.
I got a number of good laughs from this dark story, from groaning chuckles to outright guffaws. Aminah’s mission is to get Armadillo to help her rescue her brother, and she employs an impossible ruse, but due to Armadillo’s deteriorating sense of logic and time, he buys it. And the title? I won’t spoil it, you’ll have to see the play to discover what an “Armadillo Necktie” is.
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