By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com
photo by Scoundrel & Scamp
Matt Walley creates the woeful stage character Oaf.
Here we are in the middle of 2018, in the middle of the digital special effects revolution on screens big and small, where outer space meets grueling gore and superheroes have superpower talents equal to any task.
But here we also find Matt Walley on stage at the Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre alone with a handful of old school stage props and two clanking wheelbarrows full of miscellaneous house keys, car keys, desk keys and probably the key to your heart. The one you lost Lord knows how many years ago.
That's the kind of fanciful imagination Walley creates in his theatrical character known only as Oaf, a baggy pants kind of clown without makeup, wearing a jumpsuit of horizontal prison-looking stripes.
Clearly this fellow is a prisoner of circumstance, for sure. He comes on stage with a metal bar wrapped around his waist and a big lock dangling from the front of it. As he moves through his hour-long non-stop act there will be a lot of locks and elaborate struggles to finally break free.
But not nearly as many locks as there are keys lying around. Only...that's a part of life, too, isn't it? So many keys promising release, but none of them actually working.
Instead of technology, Walley is employing psychology. The kind that's been honed over the centuries by village entertainers silently playing bums and kings of every description in town squares of all sizes long before electricity was invented,
A brilliant stroke in Walley's act is introducing this character on an empty stage and then discovering that Walley is actually backstage at a circus freak show and his character is the freak.
At the most awkward moments in his struggles with all those keys, locks, chains and such, a curtain is lifted at the back of the stage and we see the front of a circus freak show stage where another audience gawks for a few moments while Walley is forced to pretend he is a raging wild man-beast.
It's all so demeaning, doubling down on the sympathy Walley creates fumbling through his struggles to finally get loose from his insidious bonds. Only to be forced into more humiliating work demanded by management.
Just watching him will become an easy leap to see the endless frustrations in your own daily life, spilling the breakfast coffee, getting stopped by all the traffic lights on the way to work, then having the office computer crash just when that big report is due – the one that you were supposed to have finished yesterday.
Walley does it all using no dialogue whatsoever, letting his body language and facial expressions tell the tale in ways that are universally understood.
Serving as director and co-creator is Wolfe Bowart, who has an international reputation as physical theater playwright and performer helping keep this timeless facet of entertainment alive. Bowart and Walley are Scoundrel & Scamp artists-in-residence
“Oaf” continues through June 3, with performances at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, at the Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre in the Historic Y, 738 N. Fifth Ave.
Tickets are $22 general admission, $20 for age 10-29, $15 teachers and students with valid ID, $12 children 9 and under. Questions? Call the box office, 448-3300. For details and reservations, Scounddscamp.org/oaf
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