Review: ‘Tin Cat Shoes,’ a Commentary on the Silliness of the System

NEW YORK — To your cherished list of warm-weather city pleasures — handmade Italian ices, sidewalk breezes on bare limbs, dumb movies in air-conditioned theaters — you should think about adding Summerworks. Now 23 years old, this staple of the East Village culturescape, which has initiated its latest season with a mind-frisking comedy called “Tin Cat Shoes,” provides entertainment that feels custom-made for a “school’s out” state of mind.

For starters, its ticket prices are cheap ($25). But the shows it puts on, under the banner of Clubbed Thumb productions, always look inventively stylish, rather like the luminous young things of the neighborhood who assemble thrift-shop rags into passable imitations of couture. The casts regularly include quirky familiar faces you just know you’ve seen before, whether on Broadway or “Law & Order.”

As for those of you who like to imagine you’re at the vanguard of all things artistic, Summerworks allows you to say you knew certain rising playwrights before your friends did. Samuel D. Hunter (“The Whale”), Clare Barron (the current “Dance Nation”), Anne Washburn (“Mr. Burns”) and Sarah DeLappe (“The Wolves”) have all worked with Clubbed Thumb.

But if you just want to chill out with a buzz on, Summerworks is good for that, too. Its productions are usually short and intermission-free, and it specializes in funny, agreeably unhinged shows that often don’t make a lot of sense until you think about them afterward. Watching these productions, you are advised to drift with the bubbly flow as you wonder what on earth was in that drink you had earlier.

Which brings us to Trish Harnetiaux’s “Tin Cat Shoes,” which runs through May 29 and is directed by Knud Adams. This story of a peppy troop of shoe-store employees in the Pacific Northwest is, in many ways, a classic shaggy dog story.

Or rather, shaggy bear. Such an animal figures prominently in the play’s looping plot, when it sucks (or is it pulls?) one of the characters on a company outing into its cave. Of course, it could have been one of those “bear paws on a stick,” like people carry at parades in New Orleans.

That’s according to a guy named Lunch (Pete Simpson), who really doesn’t know what he’s talking about but says it with great authority. As he should. Lunch has been trained by his employer, Rex (played by that sacred eminence of downtown mayhem, David Greenspan).

Rex, you see, is “a Systems Guy,” who teaches those who work for him (his “team-family”) to think in terms of the principals of his “Shoe System.” This is what the newest member of the establishment, Gemma (Emily Cass McDonnell), has to learn.

The others — who also include Pepper (Donnetta Lavinia Grays) and Cheddar (Kyle Beltran) — are eager to initiate her into the mindless minutiae of said System, as well as their shared personal mythology. They love to perform “Fugue for Tinhorns” from “Guys and Dolls” and tell the story of what Cheddar did with the hambone left over from an Easter dinner.

In its opening scenes, “Tin Cat Shoes” may put you in mind of a stretched-out sketch from “Portlandia,” the TV series that sends up the green-thinking, cosmos-contemplating denizens of Oregon coffee shops. But Harnetiaux is following her own System, which involves dismantling our pathetic trust in all systems. Excuse me, Systems.

This goal is realized through a series of scenes in which our fumbling characters try to impose order on chaos in the Washington state wilderness (rendered in a wonderfully kitschy great outdoors setting by Kimie Nishikawa). The same impulse propels the team to try to beat the house in a Brigadoon-like mountainside casino into which they stumble.

And Pepper is systematically putting together a novel about nachos. In the gravelly voice of authority that is unique to Grays (“Men on Boats”), she ponders the book’s elements: “Grilled hamburger ... iceberg lettuce ... sour cream!”

She is interrupted by Gemma, who observes, “You realize you’re just naming ingredients, right?” But as a cryptic croupier at the roulette table (Greenspan) points out: “You know who else named ingredients? Shakespeare.”

Uh, right. It should be noted that with a lesser cast and design team the ingredients of “Tin Cat Shoes” might not seem quite as fresh or tasty. But it’s hard to resist the eccentric top spin that these performers so happily put on their lines.

You should not discount the particular joys of hearing Simpson — whose credits (Elevator Repair Service, Wooster Group, etc.) read like a map of the downtown avant-garde — pronounce the word “abstemious.” Of watching Beltran (“Fortress of Solitude”) beaming with shy but demented adoration. Or seeing McDonnell (“The Antipodes”) morph from a dewy rookie into a hard-bitten gambler à la Jeanne Moreau in “Bay of Angels.”

At the end of the show, you will be handed a sheet of discussion questions. It concludes with: “Name all the similarities to your own life that you found in this play. Now, try your best to set the list to music!”

I can think of worse summer projects.

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Production Notes:

“Tin Cat Shoes”

Through May 29 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; 212-260-0153, clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.

By Trish Harnetiaux; directed by Knud Adams; sets by Kimie Nishikawa; costumes by Sydney Maresca; lighting by Oona Curley; sound by Peter Mills Weiss; production stage manager, Corinn Moreno. Presented by Clubbed Thumb.

Cast: Kyle Beltran (Cheddar), Pete Simpson (Lunch), Emily Cass McDonnell (Gemma), Donnetta Lavinia Grays (Pepper) and David Greenspan (Rex).