Bloody Mess at On the Boards is long, funny, tortured, and brilliant. I don’t care if you don’t care for “experimental theaterâ€�: See it. And if you do occasionally enjoy the freakier stage shit, you have no excuse. (I heaped preemptive praise on them here and here.) It’s difficult to describe, but one moment: Two middle aged clowns in a nasty, grunting, crude stage fight while a cheerleader eggs them on, naked men dance with giant silver stars, and Janis Joplin wails in the background. It was funny and sad (during one comedy bit, I heard a woman in the audience sniffle, “That’s how we killed my grandma.”) There are boobies. There are dicks. There’s a sexy gorilla who throws popcorn. On opening night, there was a mid-performance fire alarm.

It was caused by voluminous farts of stage smoke and offered an excellent opportunity to nip off to the corner bar and drink tequila. You’ll get the whole story in next week’s column.

Some complained that the show was too long. Some complained that the group wasn’t rigorous enough, and lazily recycled hoary tactics used by Richard Foreman, the Wooster Group, and all those other companies a theater editor should be able to quip and cluck about. I have not seen those companies (I am young, you see, fresh and clean as the driven snow), but I fucking loved every minute of the whole weird spectacle—even the intentionally tedious bits. Viva Bloody Mess!