The Squirrels @ Sand Lake Center for The Arts, Averill Park – Review

REVIEW: The Squirrels @ Sand Lake Center for The Arts, Averill Park

By J HUNTER

It’s been established right from the jump that the Albany theater group Harbinger is dedicated to showing us things we’ve never seen before. Up until now, that’s meant putting on regional premieres of wild plays like Theresa Reback’s Dig (produced at SLCA last year) and Stephen Adly Guirgis’ The Motherfucker with The Hat. With Robert Askins’ The Squirrels, Harbinger gets to show us something most of us have never seen: Human-sized rodents with big lush tails, chirping and screaming at all & sundry from behind eight-foot tall rolling trees! As our erstwhile narrator Kerry Kazmeirowitztrimm blurts, “Is your mind blown? NOT YET!”

Kazmeirowitztrimm gets things going by walking into the theater and making a noise like a giant librarian with post-nasal drip. He then jumps onstage, whips a cell phone out of his lab coat and loudly declares, “This machine is designed to embarrass you in theaters!” Before you think, “Worst Curtain Speech EVER…”, Kerry’s Scientist slides into a fervent, caffeine-intensive “lecture” on the habits of the American grey squirrel, with vocal & visual examples provided by the primary cast and the six-squirrel ensemble who does much of its work from behind the trees that are used as both a scene backdrop and a way to “intimidate” the audience. These woods are dark & deep!

From there, multiple storylines bloom: We see Sciurus, a self-proclaimed “great squirrel” (“I fought off the Hawk,” he tells anyone or anything that may be listening), fighting off pleas from his daughter Chordata (Haley Beauregard) and her Red Squirrel / activist boyfriend Carolinensis (Raphael Cohen) to give up some of his vast supply of nuts for the starving squirrels on the outer branches. That flies in the face of the goal of Kazmeirowitztrimm’s other character: The scheming Sciuridae, who needs all Sciurus’ nuts for his followers so they can “take this tree BACK” from the Red Squirrels and “make today look like yesterday!” This line of reasoning pleases Sciurus, an aging squirrel who needs to believe he’s still the center of the tree.

The Squirrels was written in 2020, so there’s more than a few references to our 45^th President and the various flavors of mayhem he caused & inspired. There’s even a short blast of the Stormy Daniels affair (pun intended) when Rodentia, Sciurus’ adopted Red Squirrel daughter (a hilariously scheming Victoria Nieves), confronts him with the results of an earlier demonstration of “mukking.” Yes, that’s what you think it is, although “mukking” is used as an adjective as much as it is a verb. (“Will you mukking listen to me?” a character pleads at one point.) Even so, the actual mukking gets fast and furious, and seeing Kazmeirowitztrimm’s Sciuridae in full rut will live in your brain for a while, along with the rest of his stellar comedic performance.

But apart from the MAGA allusions, The Squirrels doesn’t fall far from the wizened literary tree of William Shakespeare. Dennis Skiba’s increasingly demented Sciurus is straight outta King Lear, including listening to anyone who flatters him and chucking one loyal daughter over his shoulder in favor of one who does much more than flatter. Lisa Bryk is absolutely delightful as Sciurus’ long-suffering wife Mammalia, who does what she can to smooth over her husband’s flaws and mistakes, but when the Greys and the Reds go to war, she assists Carolinensus’ revolution while trying to keep the piece. Her last scenes with Chordata are utterly heartbreaking, as is Mammalia’s anger & frustration with the mate she’s been running interference for all these seasons.

A quick word about the ensemble, which is seen throughout the play acting as a chirping, clicking, Greek chorus one moment and an angry mob beating down Chordata the next. All the cast has anthropomorphic movements down so they can go beyond their massive (and intricately constructed) costumes, and their input is just one part of a comedic smorgasbord that never leaves you hungry, though you should be hungry for more.

The Squirrels clocks in at a little under two hours, and although the pace is brisk throughout, an intermission would not have gone amiss. That said, you’ll feel no need for a stretch break as you follow Kazmeirowitztrimm and his partners down the rabbit hole (or “squirrel hole”, if you will) and into the surreal world of The Squirrels. Trust me: You’re going to mukking love it!

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