STAGE REVIEW : ‘BABY REDBOOTS’ IS BOTH A TRIBUTE AND PUT-DOWN

SAN DIEGO —  If some neo-Pu ritan moralists worry that contemporary culture is hell-bent to entertain itself to death, playwright Philip-Dimitri Galas was not among their ranks. His unique solo play, “Baby Redboots’ Revenge,” however, is a satire on both entertainment and the entertained.

Actor Sean Sullivan, who created the persona of Baby Redboots last year in Los Angeles under the late playwright’s direction, brought the work to the Cassius Carter Centre Stage Thursday night in a benefit for Galas’ scholarship fund. For sheer explosive stage presence, linguistic stamina and athletic communication skills, Sullivan is a wizard. He can spit out the work’s machine-gun patter with frenetic intensity, yet retain a surprising clarity of diction. He is a graceful dancer, winking mime and pratfall comedian rolled into one. But immediately behind his virtuoso impersonation is the scintillating prose of Galas.

To describe the solo play is no easy task. It is an exorcism, a biography, an elaborate stunt. Imagine a stand-up comic who took a total immersion course in performance art--a mode Galas despised, by the way--and devised something better. Within the span of an hour, Sullivan executes seven vignettes from the musical career of his character, Baby 4-Strings. With only short blackouts separating each segment, Sullivan’s lightning pace leaves his audience short of breath but eager for more.

Sullivan plays a string bass player in a polka band, doomed to play his single-keyed ostinato until he can exorcise the spell of his nemesis, Baby Redboots. It is both a tribute to and a put-down of the quotidian musician-entertainer, the fellow who plays polkas at blue-collar weddings and croons imitations of other people’s dated hit tunes. Galas’ “baby” characters are really adults, prodigies forced into unwilling and unsuccessful adulthood.

These prodigies are icons for the infantile minds of the entertained, and their manic desire for success mocks the viewers’ own success-fantasies. If Galas scorns these prodigy performers, he is clearly even more contemptuous of their “polkaholic” admirers.

Galas categorized some of his stage creations as avant-vaudeville, and his solo play employs many vaudevillian conventions such as the ventriloquist’s dummy and other disposable hand-props scattered about the stage. The scope is equally vaudevillian, “Everything from Shakespeare to the shimmy,” to use Galas’ own line.

As the outrageously spiked-haired Sullivan progresses through his act, he removes portions of his costume until he is down to suspenders, pants and sneakers--a parody of nightclub striptease.

On opening night, Sullivan played to a full house--although only half of the Carter’s theater-in-the-round seating was used. For all of Galas’ avant-garde traits, his plays need the more traditional orientation of a proscenium stage.

The performance will be repeated at 8 tonight at the Carter. On Nov. 15 at Sherwood Hall in La Jolla, a more extensive memorial tribute to Galas with performers Sando Counts, Helen Shumaker and Sullivan will be presented.