Reviewed by James Karas
Monks is a marvelous vehicle for Veronica Hortiguela, and Annie Lujan to highlight their talents as clowns. There is no plot to speak of and the two actors dressed as monks have a bag of gags but rely more on interacting with the audience to elicit wild laughter, sometimes it seems out of nothing.
One of the cowled ladies appears in the playing area and peers into a barrel. There is a scream (and a full laugh from the audience) as the other monk appears from within the barrel. The first monk points to the other one with her fingers in various configurations expressing surprise or wonder or who knows what and those finger actions and facial expressions have the audience roaring. These monks are clowns and they know how to make people laugh. And that’s just in the first couple of minutes.
In the tiny theatre (my guess, audience fewer than 100 people} the monks will run around the audience, roll on the floor, give us spray bottles to spray them with water and pass out lentils and I can’t remember what else. One of them has a mustache which becomes almost unglued and hangs uneasily from a corner of her upper lip.
They are supposed to be Benedictine monks in a Spanish monastery in 1157, fa la la. They tell us the rules of the monastery where there is no sex and no worldly possessions are allowed. Anyone breaking a rule is shamed by the audience. And the audience is ready to scream shame as many times as the monks direct. I don’t need to state that the audience’s participation is combined with uproarious laughter.
One of the rules of the monastery is that the monks are supposed to engage only in prayers and work. But these monks prefer to do nothing and the audience agrees with them.
They engage individual members of the audience with questions about what they do and invite one man to the stage. I assume the man who went on stage is not a plant but the monks managed to get a lot of big laughs.
The monks do have a donkey that they prefer to call an ass. The donkey loses its tail, it is found and they want to pin it on its ass. The donkey displays its anatomical appendage where its tail belongs, butt naked, and a member of the audience has to attach it there. You can only imagine the howls of laughter that this provoked. As with all gags, the monks prolong every gesture and milk the joke to its fullest.
At one point they pretend to count the number of lentils that they have and they are up to 8,449,111. As usual they involve the audience in the counting and one would wonder how many laughs can you get from a seven-digit number? The answer is a lot, and as usual they do not let go of it with a mere howl of laughter – they want more and get them.
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