About American Obsessions
When was the last time you had sex with your car, FedExed yourself into a job interview, eloped with a magazine sales team, kidnapped the boss, hypnotized the dog, dodged a Zamboni, kissed a grizzly and – crazy for love – burst (a ballistic missile) up through an Iowa cornfield? Relive those happy memories in this comic satiric sprint across the heartland of America. In this latest offering from a playwright featured in the New York Times and lauded in Booklist for his “comic timing” and “masterful turns of phrase,” an ensemble of five actors (Mad Cow and Shakespeare Festival veterans all) smash the through the guard-rails to scoop you up on a sixty-minute joyride through that maddening, contradictory, hilarious off-road wilderness we call the American Dream
Emerging from solo pieces originally crafted on the cutting edge of Manhattan’s theater scene – and which earned Sincic a reputation for his verbal fireworks and surreal sense of humor both off-Broadway (The Nat Horne Theatre) and in East Village Theaters and Poetry Slams (Theatre Club Funambules, The Knitting Factory, Dixon Place)… both above ground at comedy clubs (The Improv, The Comic Strip) and underground at jazz clubs, coffee houses, and art galleries throughout the city (The West End Jazz Club, The Postcrypt, The Centerfold) – American Obsessions invites you to…
Flee the insanely resourceful job applicant whose unrequited love for a certain CEO blooms out in strange and exotic directions… “I cling to the skids of your chopper as we lift off from your country estate…”
Obey the baseball instructional tape that bullies its silent listener – a lone Chaplinesque figure – into bizarre new displays of affection… “You must show the ball that you are not afraid of it. That’s it. Bad ball, baaad ball. You are going to have to punish the ball, you are going to have to teach the ball a lesson that it will never forget…”
Attend the unveiling of the last stroke of the last brush from the last great painting of the undisputedly last late greatest painter who ever set horsehair to canvas… “Babies were being named in honor of the great painting. The borders of a small South American dictatorship were being redrawn to more closely resemble the contours of the great painting…”
Chase a man so obsessed with his new car he abandons every pedestrian pursuit – job, home, wife, children – for fear of losing his forward momentum… “I call my wife to tell her that maybe we could work out some kind of a compromise. Move into a mobile home! Hitch it up to a big tractor-trailer, hire a driver, sit together eat pork chops and yellow rice, drink Kool-Aid from a canteen, look out across the TV tray, out the living room window to this great country of ours rolling past us like a long unbreakable movie…”
Kiss an author so hungry for love he invites his readers home to serve as adoptive parents and (in the ultimate regression) give birth to him on his own living room floor… “Gosh. And if you were a letter and your car an envelop, you could just up and mail yourself to 2624 Wicker Lane exit 27 off I-75 south! Wouldn’t that be something?”
Dodge the magazine sales team who seduce their lone subscriber into a lifetime of service… “Here at Special Magazine we take pride in knowing that the species Homo-Neanderthalus-Biedelbiekius contains but – and the numbers do not lie – one member, one number, one reader alone. Mr. Freds Bedeidlsbleak of 2736 Minnepata Drive, Fargo, ND 32472…”
Join a mysterious posse in pursuit of the ubiquitous Jim Smith who – even as he slips just out of reach – still manages to leave behind a trail of oddly familiar clues…
Who else would underline those passages in the used books I buy?
Who put the crease in the bowling shoes they give me?
Do you wipe your feet on my doormat when I’m not home?
The bus seat is still warm from you.
Your dog mistakes me.
He licks my hand for your sake…
What does the painting look like? Where is the driver going? Who is the infamous and elusive Jim Smith? American Obsessions.
From Breaking Glass:
Bootie’s Drive-In. Two bucks a car but not everybody’s got a car, so the neighbors toss their lawn-chairs over the fence and squeeze in through the broken links to reassemble amoeba-like in the gaps between the cars. The maximum comfort crowd spill out into our parking lot, the crème de la crème who gather round the dumpster we share with Red’s Auto Body, jam a broke sofa up against the chain link and kick back to enjoy the show. Tetanus shot and a good rope, you can rappel up to the luxury box on the dumpster roof, theater of the stars, study spectrographic emissions from Alpha Centari as filtered through an empty bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine. Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine, now that’s a wine in a hurry, wine on the cutting edge. You don’t age a Boone’s Farm wine. Hell, it takes nine minutes for light from the sun to reach the earth, who the hell’s got the time for that, and for what? A grape?