Studio Theatre's 'Tales of Love and Sausages' is clownish, if juvenile, fun

By Fiona Zublin
Thursday, July 15, 2010

Clowning deserves more of a place in American entertainment. Not the red-nosed circus clowns, who are uniformly terrifying, but classical pratfalls-and-pies clowns, vaudeville clowns, Shakespearean clowns -- commedia dell'arte clowns?

In "Tales of Love and Sausages," playing through July 25 at Studio Theatre, classic Italian clowning techniques and characters are melded with relatively modern jokes -- there's a "Thiller" reference. Each performance features four of seven possible scenes, populated with stock Italian characters and played by men and women wearing uniform black clothes, sneakers and classical Italian comedy masks. The outfits make the show seem more like the final performance in a college workshop than a fully realized play, but the performers are committed and go at their roles with gusto. Unfortunately the writing, characters and pride of pratfall -- all the things that make clowning worthwhile -- get lost in, well, a more focused concept. Specifically: dirty jokes.

As one would expect in a play about clowns with "sausages" in the title, there are a lot of jokes about big sausages, long sausages, "don't touch my sausage" and are you sick of this yet? Because that was only three sausage jokes, which equals a couple of minutes of "Tales of Love and Sausages." The ideal audience is therefore one that finds this joke funny enough to hear it fifteen hundred thousand times, or that is too young to understand it.