剧院不仅主要坐在整齐的座位上，等待指定的鼓掌时间。
It’s neck veins bulging, tendons tightening, flesh spilling over and under clothing. It’s breakdance and belly dance. It’s burlesque artist Rosa Robada balancing the naked skin of their backside on a bed of nails, while a cinder block resting on their stomach gets smashed with a sledgehammer. It’s a sexy clown from San Francisco troupe Fou Fou Ha! ejecting a comet tail of sparks between her legs with the aid of an angle grinder power tool. It’s also the confessional writing of self-discovery, in spoken word and freestyle form, and an act by Sterling Johnson that makes giant bubbles via soap, rope and a couple of fishing poles; in his hands, a crowd of grown-ass adults reverts to their giggling, oohing childhood selves.
这种巫师和折衷主义长期以来一直是无后悔的束缚，the variety show created byJamie DeWolfin 1998. Before the pandemic, the monthly performance’s home base was the Oakland Metro Operahouse, a converted warehouse that cast the show in a greenish, agreeably dank underworld, the kind of place where puddles of beer on the floor seemed to help make dark magic possible.
But since the show returned in person in November, it’s being performed outside in downtown Oakland with a new name: the Ruckus and Rumpus Revival. At the performance on Thursday, June 2, DeWolf acknowledged the strangeness of seeing the crowd and his fellow artists in the blazing full light of early evening. “Oh, my God, this is so bright. This is the first time I’ve seen most of your faces,” he said, joking that cast, crew and he had to drink and do lots of drugs in a tent backstage until night fell to give them cover.
如果太阳的欢呼声，缺乏羞耻感和赋予生命的特性，熟悉的肮脏和粗糙和准备的氛围仍然存在。DeWolf告诉听众，作为一个智能和最终场地的停车场。在舞台上方，隔壁的华盛顿旅馆的霓虹灯迹象没有很多字母。整个晚上，一些Ruckus和Rumpus Revival自己的舞台灯都陷入了频闪的效果上，促使DeWolf询问听众是否有人拥有技术剧院专业知识：“房子里有医生吗？” - 风格。
If the open air diffused audience laughter and gasps and shouts instead of ricocheting them around in a glorious echo chamber, it also felt true to the new name. Ruckus and Rumpus is a tent revival for misfits and freaks, those whose artistry or spectatorship has a homespun bent and a bandit streak.
在演出前的一次采访中，迪沃尔夫告诉《纪事》，图雷特斯毫不遗憾地“是我在瓦列霍（Vallejo）生气的，自杀的21岁男孩想出的名字。如果该标题准确地描述了早期节目的无政府状态，愤怒的感觉，那么随着时间的流逝，它不太合适。迪沃尔夫说：“当我说这个名字时，我会开始畏缩。”
If the show isn’t back to performing monthly yet — DeWolf anticipates appearing next in the fall — the June 2 Ruckus and Rumpus Revival was such a dazzling, inspiring and celebratory display of talent, the overwhelming majority of it local, that you ought to set all your calendar alerts, sign up for all the newsletters and follow on all the social media now so that you’re sure to catch the next one.
Pole artist Bob Exothermal, performing to the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun,” approached his contortions with a languorous, quizzical expression, as if he couldn’t totally handle his own sexiness. Break-dancers from Oakland Originalz redrew the geometry of the human form.
Performer Jackson McBrayer, who uses a wheelchair, made a watertight case for the desirability of adoptees — “I never understood the insult, ‘You were adopted.’ I’m like, ‘Bitch, I was picked!’ ” — and supplied vivid technical tips on performing cunnilingus. Performance artists Howie and Dina Goodsell crafted a defining image for our historical moment in strangling a woman aborting a parade of babies with the umbilical cord tumbling out of her own body.
And then there was sideshow artist Cat Sweet, who awoke in the manner of the bride of Frankenstein to perform a macabre ritual and visit carnage upon the stage: pouring a berry-colored liquid on herself and on dog dishes full of dry ice, only to start stapling playing cards to her abdomen, breasts, cheeks and forehead and searing her face with the sparks from an angle grinder (the power tool of the night, evidently).
Never let naysayers and ignoramuses tell you that Bay Area theater is all tidy and safe, elitist and politically correct. At the Ruckus and Rumpus Revival, the marker of success is how far on the limb of your own originality you’re willing to go.