Let’s hope the U.S. Croquet Association is not meeting in Washington in the next few weeks: Happenstance Theater’s second “Cabaret Macabre” might send the group’s members into shock. The cheerfully sinister, tongue-in-cheek sketch-and-music show — an all-new follow-up to Happenstance’s 2010 Halloween-timed offering — includes a portrait of a prim croquet match devolving into a homicidal free-for-all. Mallets swing through the air like battle-axes en route to players’ skulls (it’s all done in slow motion) as a fastidious commentator, standing to one side, reads from the official Rules of Croquet. The lawn game may not have received such a spoofing since Lewis Carroll had Alice play it with a flamingo and curled-up hedgehog.
The bloodthirsty croquet match is one of the highlights of Happenstance’s light but witty vaudeville, which pays unabashed (and acknowledged) tribute to the black-crepe-draped aesthetic of artist and writer Edward Gorey (perhaps most famous for the images in the credit sequence for PBS’s “Mystery!”). Devised and performed by a six-member ensemble — including Happenstance artistic co-directors Mark Jaster and Sabrina Mandell and Taffety Punk Theatre Company’s Esther Williamson — “Cabaret Macabre” often looks like a Gorey illustration brought to life. Against the backdrop of a blood-red curtain, characters stalk about in Edwardian garb — mourning weeds, top hats and tails, children’s sailor suits, an astrakhan jacket — with somber expressions or wickedly glinting eyes. Skits, songs and tableaux conjure up stories that are cartoonishly bleak: young boys who receive dueling pistols as birthday presents (with grim consequences); a husband who wheels his catatonic and legless wife around in a bath chair; demurely aproned maids who gossip about a neighbor’s unfortunate demise (“The inspector said it must have been a landmine . . .”).
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