Jane Wickline Is Down to Clown in “Dukes”
The night that I attended Jane Wickline and Liva Pierce’s goofball, lo-fi musical-comedy act, “Dukes,” currently playing at the SoHo Playhouse, the space was muggy and uncomfortable, the air still smoky from wildfires up in Canada. But, though the atmosphere felt dystopian, the crowd was buoyant, and also unusually young for a New York theatre audience—elder Gen Z-ers with funky hair, baggy pants, and puppyish energy. They were indistinguishable from the show’s two stars, who sat quietly among us, a few rows from the stage, peacefully streaming pornography.
After an announcer warned audience members to turn off their phones, the duo protested, then jumped onstage to deliver a funny, philosophical song about porn, with Wickline on keyboard. The lyrics were all about craving a better, more ambitious version of porn—not more extreme but more creative. “I want a new kind of porn that’s less literal / Maybe the actors turn to Claymation in the middle—or something mixed-media like that. / Show me a porn that makes me want to take dance classes! / Show me a porn that’s just a live stream of lightning flashes!” (Their boldest suggestion, which someone really should try: smut filmed in the course of twelve years, “Boyhood” style.)
The revue that followed, a satisfyingly silly buddy comedy about the go-nowhere adventures of two “dukes”—a blend of “dudes” and “dykes”—felt like its own live stream of lightning flashes, playful, illuminating, and unpretentiously experimental. As directed by Henry Hornbuckle and Mabel Lewis, it was comic spaghetti, a high proportion of which stuck. “Dukes,” with its mordant queer in-jokes and janky, minor-key vaudevillian sensibility, also put a modern spin on a classic dynamic: two lovable losers who “get” each other more than anybody else gets them. It’s a glorious inheritance that runs from Laverne and Shirley to Abbi and Ilana, Abbott and Costello to Romy and Michele, Bill and Ted to Barb and Star; the model relies on chemistry, as well as on a hard-to-hit blend of dumb and smart. For eighty minutes, Wickline, a “Saturday Night Live” cast member with a sweetly woeful Buster Keaton affect, and Pierce, a Second City alum who plays her delusionally suave, swaggering partner, managed to nail it.
They play best friends and roommates with bad jobs and no girlfriends, killing time in an apartment that looks like a kid’s crayon drawing: a lumpy sofa, an ugly lamp, a window facing a wall of bricks. Everything feels a little askew, down to a tilted painting of two dot-eyed Victorian waifs, wearing frilled collars, whose blend of archness and innocence mirrors the dukes’ own vibe. The only solid thing in the room is their friendship, with Pierce, the troublemaker, egging on their worrywart pal. “You know how I know you’re a real friend? You emboldened me to start drinking again,” Wickline tells Pierce, earnestly. In physical terms, they’re nearly twins: each has lank, dark hair, a pale face with no makeup, and a klutzy-seductive charisma, and they lounge around in old-man slacks and loose button-downs accessorized by the odd purple fedora or tiny veiled hat. There are a bunch of solid jokes about their adjacent but not identical sexual identities; during a blowout fight, Pierce yells, meanly but accurately, “My gender isn’t that different from yours, it’s just a little more! ”
Other than that, not much happens. They sing a funny song about hating their jobs, a weird song about being firemen and saving pretty girls, and a surreal song about rescuing a lost crystal goose and winning a prize that fixes their lives. Between musical numbers, they collaborate on writing a double-date ad—“I have strong morals, but I often forget that I have them and unwittingly cause shocking harm to those around me”—only to have their “gorgeous dates” fall into a pizza oven. Wickline moons after a supposedly psychic neighbor (played by Pierce, in a bad wig); in a flashback, a teen-age Pierce macks on a MILF (Wickline, in a worse wig). Many of their best bits are throwaway gags, like the revelation that Wickline works at a nonprofit called KeepTabs, “a resource to people who want to track whether someone else has taken their pill,” or Pierce’s irritable complaint “That’s the worst we’ve ever been heckled at a funeral.”
Not every moment clicks—a scene in which Pierce “cucked” Wickline turned the knob from kooky to creepy—but not everything has to work for the show to deliver. “Dukes” has a few obvious comedic antecedents, among them the goofus duos behind “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” and “Flight of the Conchords,” and also the melancholic viral-video virtuoso Bo Burnham. Like their spiritual older brothers from the Lonely Island, the dukes’ sweet spot is groovy, digressive musical numbers that parody pop-funk (although theirs have a folksier edge). Still, by the show’s end, the duo’s rueful existentialism, their sense of bemused Gen Z paralysis in a burning world, reminded me just as much of my own generation’s wryest observational standup, Steven Wright, a masterly deliverer of monotone gags such as “I intend to live forever. So far, so good.”
In one of my favorite sequences, Wickline, in a rage at her compulsive scrolling, impulsively throws her phone into the Hudson River—then realizes that she can’t figure out how to get back home or how to pay for the C train. She winds up taking a pedicab while grooving to a Bruno Mars song that she can’t quite identify, a spontaneous adventure that bears some resemblance to the evening itself. Sometimes you just enjoy the sound of a person’s voice.
To see an even younger crowd, you can catch Ryan Drake’s “Big Feelings,” an unnerving interactive play in which audience members are deputized to play a class of first graders. When you arrive, you get handed a nametag—mine said “Primrose.” Upstairs, at the Cell Theatre’s gallery space, you enter a tidy, sunny first-grade classroom, where you are told to place your bag in a cubby that’s been pre-labelled with your new name. At your desk, there’s a printed page with an assignment: draw a picture of a time you lost control. Excited, I doodled a picture of myself weeping because Air France had lost my luggage. By the time the “teacher” showed up, I’d entered an eerie, almost narcotic state, suspended between my first-grade self and my adult one.
In an elementary-school classroom, you feel simultaneously safe and vulnerable, subject to someone else’s control and open to their guidance. In a theatre, it’s a little bit the same. The teacher, played skillfully by Julia Greer, initially came across as a wonderful role model—sweet, enthusiastic, gently authoritative, a little twee. But cracks quickly appeared, beginning with the alternately harsh and nurturing approach she took toward a student named Nico, whose presence was indicated by only an empty stool. “You’re not being safe with your body. Disrupting class with comments!” she chided him, urging him not to disappoint her. It felt like a message to us all: Don’t let me down.
A few minutes in, the teacher delivered some disturbing news: this would be her last day in our classroom. Step by step, her boundaries began to drop. A darker story started to emerge— something about her father, something about a soccer game—a hidden narrative ominously encoded in each of our lessons, in her math problems and vocabulary drills and storybook reading. Still, we had to play along: raise our hands, sit crisscross applesauce. These revelations, I must say, left me doubting that, had any of this happened in a real school, the teacher would be allowed to say goodbye to the class. But, if the show’s details didn’t entirely hold together, it mattered very little, because the theatrical experience was so compelling. It felt scary, in a powerful way, to get dropped into the body of a small child—and to feel that escape could come only with the ringing of a bell. ♦