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Scenes From A Marathon (Part 3)

12:30-2:30 p.m. Saturday at Hudson Guild Theater (cont.):
Three Hole Punch

The Cambridge, Mass.-based female foursome Three Hole Punch proved to be one of the best out-of-town groups seen during the weekend. Its members, Shannon Connolly, Misch Whittiker, Liz Caradonna and Stephanie Jones, have performed together for six years, and it showed in their ability to construct interlocking stories for their Marathon performance and develop their characters within them. They alternated between two main plots, one of a pouting little girl being bullied by a couple so-called friends at her own birthday party, with another of a funeral home where the owner’s mother periodically rises from the casket to cause havoc. It all elicited lots of laughs from the audience.


7:30-9:30 p.m. at Hudson Guild Theater:
Casting Couch

Our return visit to the Marathon Saturday night was also a return to the Hudson Guild Theater, beginning with L.A. trio Casting Couch (Lindsay Katai, Laura Turner Garrison, Diana Wright) who generated 13 distinct little bits, some recurring, in their 30-minute spot. They found several amusing games, including one about a budding hair stylist paying a homeless person to practice on her, and another in which Katai stole the show with obliviousness as a friend lays near death after having an allergic reaction to brownies she baked.

Bassprov
The highlight of the entire Marathon, though, might very well have been Bassprov’s second set, one of the few given a one-hour time slot and quite justifiably so. This time, with guest Matt Walsh (as “Cousin David Kenny”), the duo crafted a non-stop mind-bending exploration of absurdities, misunderstandings, theories on time travel and holes in the space-time continuum that would be enough to make Doc Brown’s head spin. At first, Walsh and the duo dwelled on Lance Armstrong, Sheryl Crow and tabloid items, then Walsh’s claim that his first kiss was with Ann Margaret when he was seven and his parents took him to Vegas.

The latter half of the Bassprov set built on Mark Sutton’s (Donny) plans to leave his job as a copier salesman to start his own wind farm project which sparked all sorts of dialogue about everything from what to do about geese flying into the windmills to conducting electricity -- and then repeating large portions of the same improvised dialogue from memory once their characters started stepping out of the scene and into a few time warps. In this set, the duo with Walsh didn’t produce quite the same pre-written feel to the improvisation, but delivered a performance that was truly masterful all the same.

Click here for 4th & final part.

  

   

     

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