THREE CHICKENS CONFRONT EXISTENCE
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
★★★★★
“packs excellence in every moment”
If you’ve ever wondered what battery chickens actually do while confined inside their indoor cages, Bill Schaumberg has the answers for you. Well, maybe not answers, as such, but a thoroughly dystopian, and hilarious, analysis of chicken hell. A brilliantly written script by Schaumberg, who also directs, accompanied by accomplished actors Audrey Rapoport, Matthew DiLoreto, and Eric Kirchberger, ensures an egg-cellent experience for those lucky enough to score a ticket to this show.
The set up is simple enough. Three chickens, Helen, Bronseman and Reginald, are confined in their cages, awaiting the moment when they are selected to meet the broiler. Like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, the problem is how to pass the time until they meet their fate. The chickens know that broiler time will eventually arrive, but they don’t know when. Reginald, the mathematician and aesthete, tackles the problem by trying to create a formula that will allow him to calculate exactly when the moment arrives. Helen, a retired egg layer (and one of the few to make it to the broiler cages) practices gratitude. Bronseman is the skeptic occupying the middle cage, listening to his fellows and trying to figure it all out. In the space of an hour we follow these three as they invent mathematics, philosophy, theology, art and politics in an attempt to stave off boredom until the next delivery of food pellets rattles down upon them.
Schaumberg’s witty script, and the talents of Rapoport, DiLoreto and Kirchberger in their extravagantly feathered chicken costumes make this anything but a boring experience. Three Chickens Confront Existence isn’t an easy hour though. For one thing, it’s not always a laugh minute. Schaumberg sets up a series of themes which require the audience’s close attention. That attention is rewarded by the laugh we get when we finally realize where the chickens’ latest rumination is heading. A good example is when they decide (for want of anything better to do, and to distract themselves from their impending fate) to invent their own origin story. I won’t give the punchline away, but let’s just say that a very old joke gets a makeover, and you won’t see it coming. And that’s just one example. Perhaps the biggest gift of the show is to make us understand that humans and battery chickens have much in common. And if that thought doesn’t shake you to the core of your existence, I don’t know what to tell you.
Three Chickens Confront Existence packs excellence in every moment. And that includes the design. Costume designer Sasha Richter has gone to town on feathers for the chickens. The bright colours contrast vividly with the sketched in cages that Helen, Bronseman and Reginald inhabit. The lighting is sharply focused on the costumes that cover the actors from head to toe except their faces. So the pressure is on to reveal everything about these characters with just the actors’ facial expressions, and a bare minimum of body movements. They are chickens confined in cages, after all. Rapoport, DiLoreto and Kirchberger show they are more than up to the challenge, and DiLoreto’s face in particular punctuates Schaumberg’s lines with added ironic significance.
If you’re expecting easy laughs and a feel good experience from Three Chickens Confront Existence, you may be disappointed. But if a hilarious take on existential doubt from a chicken’s point of view sounds intriguing, go see this show. You will be richly rewarded.
THREE CHICKENS CONFRONT EXISTENCE
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Reviewed on 5th August at Belly Button at Underbelly, Cowgate
by Dominica Plummer
Photography by Lexi Grabokski
