Frogz, penguins, & lizards — Oh, my

By Derek Paiva
Advertiser Entertainment Writer

'Frogz' by Imago Theatre 8 p.m. Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday Leeward Community College Theatre $15 — $30 455-0385 Also: 7:30 p.m. today; Maui Arts & Cultural Center Castle Theater, $10-$28 (half-price for children 12 and younger), 242-7469

The production has frogs in it — a trio of 'em, in fact. Large beings, with slimy-looking, pale green and yellow bodies, they are fond of staring down the audience until something sets them off on a frenzied acrobatic game of one-upmanship.

Still, an explanation for the quintet of penguins that engage in a somewhat nasty game of musical chairs might be nice.

And what does that entity that tries to maneuver its way out of a large paper bag, all the while creating some twisted new Twyla-Tharp-goes-7-Eleven modern dance, have to do with those glowing schools of wildly colored, black-lighted fish?

Also, how the heck does one explain the presence of a large blue thing named Oskar, strangely fond of unfastening its head and tossing it into the audience like a beach ball?

Enter the co-creator of this madness, Jerry Mouawad, calling from the offices in Portland, Ore., where he and his and wife/partner-in-art, Carol Triffle, run the Imago Theatre. His task was to enlighten us on Imago's carnival of acrobatic movement, inventive costuming and candy-coloring "Frogz," here this weekend for two stagings at Leeward Community College Theatre.

"I'd say that life itself is the overriding theme," Mouawad explained.

"And if you wanted to go a little bit deeper into that, it would be metamorphosis, or how things change and evolve."

Uh-huh. This was about when your writer began thinking "Frogz" was looking more and more like an hour and 45 minutes of arty theatrical hoo-hah, too.

In truth, "Frogz" mixes lowbrow ambition (meaning, anyone who can tell the front of LCC Theatre from the back will understand this stuff) with highbrow execution (remarkable movement, whimsical staging, inventive and innovative costuming).

"A large part of 'Frogz' is both metamorphosis and illusion," Mouawad said. "And that's why the show can attract a 3-year-old as well as a 70-year-old professor who's highly intellectual. The child will get as excited about the metamorphosis and illusions as the professor, but the professor will try to find further shades of depth in the work. That's our intent. And I think it's worked, because the show has been so successful."

The first and longest-running production of the 24-year-old theatre company, "Frogz" has in two decades morphed from a small regional success story to a production that has toured all 50 states (Imago was last here in 1994) and countless international destinations. The production even earned audience and critical raves during limited Broadway runs in 2000 and 2002.

Mouawad and co-creator Triffle have rooted "Frogz" (and consequently, much of Imago's theatrical output since they found the company) on the teachings of Jacques Lecoq, a French theater legend who experimented with combining varied elements of movement and the visual arts with theatre. Julie Taymor, the celebrated auteur of Disney's Broadway staging of "The Lion King," and the founders of well-known European mask theatre Mummenschanz are also graduates of Lecoq's teachings. Lecoq passed away in 1999.

"(Lecoq) really opened our eyes to looking at the world through movement," Mouawad said. "Because of that, we would look at silent films and the work of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd. They were working in the same mediums we were working in — coming up with bits of business or comedy based on a particular incident, without a full-fledged play. They'd work from the inside out."

Save for some incomprehensible gibberish, "Frogz" is kept dialogue-free and wholly dependent on communicating meaning and comedy via the movements of its five costumed performers, a trippy music score and some clever lighting tricks.

The production's dozen or so vignettes are largely the final result of an original idea from Mouawad or Triffle (say, "five penguins somewhere in the arctic") blended with ideas and countless hours of performer trial and error from rehearsals (say, "play a ruthless game of musical chairs").

The trio of amphibians in the production's namesake vignette includes a puddle jumper with an inferiority complex stemming from his sub-par leaping skills.

"And that wasn't really preconceived," Mouawad said. "When we were working on the show one year, someone that we hired was a great performer, but he couldn't jump at all. He just could not jump. So instead of hiding that fact, we embellished it, and the piece evolved from it."

"Paperbag," that piece about an unknown entity trying to escape from a brown paper sack? Credit it to one of the couple's stranger dinner party guests for putting a little battery-operated toy in a paper bag and placing it on the floor to watch the toy animate the bag's movement from within.

Individual pieces are constantly added and dropped from the production to keep "Frogz" a fresh experience for the audience and Imago's performers. And while the production as a whole ably shoulders that previously mentioned overall theme examining the metamorphosis and evolution of life, each piece in "Frogz" remains blessedly free of specific meaning.

"Truthfully, if a piece had a very specific theme, Carol and I would probably try to loosen it up so it didn't," said Mouawad, laughing.

Mouawad and Triffle save their loftier artistic goals for other more highbrow productions that Imago stages with the substantial money it collects from "Frogz" — a production of Jean-Paul Sarte's "No Exit" on a tilting stage here, an experimental adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca's "Blood Wedding" there.

Still, Mouawad and Triffle have much love for the simple pleasures of their first and most-popular creation.

"The moments in 'Frogz' are part of our everyday lives," Mouawad said. "We're not doing Chekov ... or these really big brush strokes of humanity. We're just taking in the really simple moments of life."

All righty, then. So based on some of Mouawad's more recently enjoyed "simple moments of life," what can audiences expect from "Frogz" next Honolulu visit?

"Well," Mouawad said, "I was playing with aluminum foil at home the other day ..."