INhonolulu Magazine Issue #16 - April 2014 | Page 12

Review / Cockadoodledoo

The chickens
are praying
Will Caron
Photos by Denise de Guzman

I

n the theatre of the absurd,
surrealism is king. This is certainly true of Eric Yokomori’s
bizarre, child-like and truly hilarious play Cockadoodledoo, on stage
at Kumu Kahua Theatre through
the end of April.
The play centers around a small,
backwater town and its bored,
highly imaginative residents.
When a meteorite strikes farmer
Templeton’s chicken coop, things
get weird (well, weirder than they
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already were).
Templeton (Jason Kanda)
swears the chickens are praying to the alien object and
burying themselves as they die
(“clever chickens!”); a strange,
sword-wielding man in outlandish clothing appears to be
waiting for someone (not Godot
though); and space-suit wearing government agents descend
on the town to conduct tests on
the effects of irradiated chicken
meat on human physiology.
But, as in all good surrealist
work, we’re not quite sure what’s
really “real,” and what’s being
dreamed up by the characters.
And the medium of the play itself—inherently a work of imagination where nothing is “real”

anyway—only serves to further
pretzel the mind.
The wacky characters infuse
the surrealism with comedic life.
There’s Maddie, the owner of the
local diner and the object of affection for at least two secret admirers (the first of whom signs his
love letters “Z” and may or may
not be a masked vigilante who defends the poor and downtrodden).
Maddie (Tiffany Rose Brown)—
one of the biggest day-dreamers in
the play—is more interested in the
fantasy love contained in each letter she receives than she is in the
real-life love Burt could give her.
Burt (Shawn Forsythe), of
course, is training to become a
mercenary (“soldier of fortune”)
in order to impress Maddie, while

Ziggy (Reb Beau Allen) just wants
a piece of that meteor so he can
look at it every day (that and a
chicken to fry up).
Another interesting character is
Goober (Daniel Kelin II), the town
bum—er, “ventriloquist.” He and
his puppet—er, friend—Ketchup,
are like an absurdist version of the
conventional blind prophet. Like
Tiresias, he has one foot on either
side of the metaphysical equation:
wisdom versus insanity, foresight
versus ignorance, light versus dark
(though in a postmodern, intentionally disappointing kind of
way). And while he hints at the
play’s incredibly surreal ending
before it happens, no one seems
to listen to him (though this could
be because he won’t stop shouting
about potatoes).
Then there’s Pyles. Pyles (AJ
Song) is the town mailman and,
consequently, the harbinger of

news. His character is interesting beyond the fact that when he
gets angry (usually at inanimate
objects like toasters or ice cubes)
he hits himself repeatedly in the
face until he knocks himself out.
In a town where nothing happens,
news and letters are a commodity—a recurring theme of the story.
This makes Pyles, in all his glorious absurdity, a powerful and important person in town, even if he
doesn’t see it that way. He and his
news are the g