ARTS REVIEW: THE PAJAMA MEN - 'THE LAST STAND TO REASON'

The Talent of Sketch Comedy Duo Shenoah Allen & Mark Chavez Blew Me Away

By: Ben Kharakh

February 17, 2011

(February 16, 2011 in New York) I went into The Pajama Men's The Last Stand to Reason knowing nothing about the show except that it was at St. Ann's Warehouse, which I think is a cool venue, and that the show got rave reviews in the UK. I left in almost the same state: understanding little about what I had just seen except for the astounding nature of the performance.

It might strike some as strange to emphasize the talent of duo Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez since it doesn't reveal anything about the content of their show. It's an observation that needs to be considered in the context of exactly how much comedy I take in, which is a lot. Sketch, TV, film, podcast, etc. In all of these arenas, if I like what the performer is doing, I want them to do more of it. But The Pajama Men so blew me away that I want to put them into all of these different venues and see where their abilities can take them.

See, there are things a performer may provide: voices, faces, jokes, commitment, innovation, etc. And certainly all of the above were found in The Last Stand to Reason, but The Pajama Men did all of the above and more just very very well--and I don't just mean that their impersonations of women sounded like women and not like gay men.

It's apt that the duo performed onstage in pajamas because the show certainly struck me as surreal, with sketches transitioning seamlessly by route of a dreamlike logic. Beginning with the introduction, which was that Mark and Shenoah had just been on a train trip, the performance turned into a series of character interactions onboard the crowded locomotive. Superficially, the show was about a father going on a shooting rampage after his son was killed by a train bandit, but at its core, what was really going on was an exploration of the characters Shenoah and Mark embodied.

At one point, Shenoah told Mark he does a good English face. "It's regional too," Mark replied, and then assumed the face of an Englishman from Birmingham. The crowd ate it up. Elsewhere in the show, Shenoah was an aloof French woman sitting next to a small creature with pincers and a scrunched up face. You knew the creature was small because whenever it confronted the aloofness of its French companion, it would protest, bewildered, "But I'm so small!"  Later, after different characters were given their share of attention, the audience followed the creature, portrayed by Mark, as it was thrown off the train, and interrupted a game of Russian roulette played by two foreigners who could only speak broken English. Soon the creature found itself clasping the gun, hesitating to pull the trigger. "Does dying hurt?" it asked. "Yes," replied one of the foreigners, before Mark and Shenoah jumped into two other characters. And even though Mark and Shenoah were sharing with me two new people, I still wanted to know what happened to the creature.

That Mark and Shenoah were able to create characters so real that I found myself caring what happened to them would be reason enough for me to praise the show. That I remember, "But I'm so small," days afterward is why I'll be following The Pajama Men further into their career. I can't imagine what they'll do next, but I'm certainly eager to see it.