Administrator at the Village School, whose enrollment includes students from more than 40 countries, called Cleare to say his scholarship remained available. Cleare decided to return only if he lived elsewhere and left Rutherford¡¯s program. Is ¡°The B Team,¡± in which youngish white actors clown around as Arab terrorists adrift in Buffalo, funny? In the frat-boy lampoon skidding across the super-tiny D.C. Arts Center stage, that¡¯s the only question that matters. It¡¯s funny or die. Bad news: The Landless Theatre Company show flat-lines. Maybe you¡¯ll find a pulse in gags such as this teasing pout, spoken from one would-be terrorist to another: ¡°Don¡¯t be a-mad, Ammad.¡± Or this ¡°A League of Their Own¡± homage: ¡°There¡¯s no crying in jihad.¡± There¡¯s something to this line, though, spat out by a tough but frustrated jihadist named Sadiq: ¡°You are children dressed like terrorists for a terrorist-themed birthday party!¡± As Charles M. Schulz¡¯s Lucy famously said to Schroeder, ¡°That¡¯s it!¡± The characters, all guys, are goofballs who can¡¯t get their dangerous act together. The cell leader once froze when he was supposed to detonate a bomb, and now his hands are paralyzed in ¡°thumbs up¡± position. (This leads to Fonzie jokes.) A shoe bomber inadvertently leaves his shoe bomb in a shoe store. Perhaps, one terrorist thinks mere seconds before a group suicide mission at Niagara Falls, it¡¯s finally time to reveal that he¡¯s gay. The humor is ¡°South Park¡±-y and ¡°Daily Show¡±-ish, only not so sharp and not nearly sustainable over 90 minutes. The plus side is that writer David Holstein comes up with some amusing punch lines from time to time, and the actors in Bob Bartlett¡¯s no-frills production have the low-key manner of perpetually immature dudes in a passable Hollywood bromance. There really isn¡¯t much comic surprise, though, and if the casting of white guys as Orange Julius- and Adidas-obsessed characters named Mohamed, Abdul and Abu was part of the big joke, it doesn¡¯t land, despite spitting-out-the-fibers shtick with fake black beards. Ptui! The B Team |
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