Paul Zaloom, The Mother of All Enemies
March - Apri 2007, The puppet show portrayed Karagoz as a gay guy. He is walking around the city of an unnamed country (but obviously Turkey) with his boyfriend when the police arrive (puppets are pink pigs). He is arrested and sits on the bonnet of puppet car and is taken to jail. In jail he starts to flatulent and this flatulence at one point releases a Buttfart Genie who grants him wishes, as many as he wants, as the genie does not know how many he has to give.
So, Karagoz says thank you and doesn’t do much for a day or two and then having forgotten his grant of wishes he strokes his beard and says I wish that there was a hole in the ground that I could crawl through and low and behold a hole opens up but it is dark and so now he needs a flashlight. So he says, “I wish I had a flashlight” and of course he gets one but it is not bright enough and so he says “I really wish I had a stronger flashlight” and of course he gets that too. So, he escapes and he calls his boyfriend on the phone who says “don’t come because the house is surrounded by police” and so Karagoz asks himself what he should do and he says “I wish I was in a land of the free and lo” and behold a small plane appears and he starts flying to the U.S. but the place runs out of fuel and he lands in the middle of an al Qaeda training camp in Pakistan and when the leader asks him where he is going he is about to say to find a boyfriend when he decides that maybe this is not the best thing to say and he says he is on the way to the land of the free and the brave and they say, “Oh, wonderful we will help you and can you take this briefcase to the lady in green” and he says fine.
They fuel up his plane and (I cannot exactly remember what happens next) but he is in a boat in the harbor of NYC near the lady and the coast guard arrive and ask him where he is from and he said from Pakistan and then of course he is surrounded by more coast guards and sniffing dogs and the sniffing dog here the tick tock of a bomb and it blows up blowing the head off the dog and the audience all sigh!!!!! Then Paul (the puppet master) ran around to the front of the stage and said what do you mean by sighing it is just a puppet dog and what about me you don’t care I have Carpal Tunnel in my hands from the puppets. And then he goes off about emails he has been receiving from army recruiters who want him to join the army and this back and forth conversation goes on until he sends them an email asking them about there don’t Ask, don’t tell policy and he says “of course, I am not saying whether I am or not” and that was the end of their recruitment effort of him. So back to the puppet play
Karagoz somehow ends up the Christian right part of American and the leader of one particular group while espousing all the correct garbage is really gay and tries to pick him up in a bar….Well the long and the short is he ends up back in jail in Turkey and he is visited by his Buttfart Genie who complains that most people would have wished for money, or a house, or car, or something sensible but not Karagoz he wishes for a flash flight and then a bigger flashlight, etc. etc. He starts flatulenting again and this time out comes, not a genie but the army recruiter who was trying to get him to join the army and has taken a fancy to him.
How does the story end? Paul had no idea. He said, “I really don’t have an end for this story it just like our current situation…we went into it unclear how to get out and so I thought I would give you a choice of three endings’
It was SOOOOOOOOO funny!
They will be back at the BCA Feb 7 - 12, 2008 with The Divine Reality Comedy
http://www.theatermania.o/ or 866-811-4111
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