Famously described by the New York Times Serious Play Review for Serious People as "The Diary of Anne Frank meets Cirque du Soleil with trained bears, I mean literally these bears are the best fucking actors I have ever seen, fuck the goddamn Academy Awards." Alvin Carrey's "Le Dernier Morceau de la Poire Rouge" was inspired by an unfinished symphony of Nicolas Formé whose Op. 2 reportedly called for a complete complement of "bêtes féroces" (trans: ferocious beasts) rather than the traditional human instrumentalists.
Carrey's adaptation is a period piece taking place in 32nd Century Mars right after the planet was inadvertently terraformed into a pear-like shape due to a miscommunication by lowly bureaucrat and hopeless chocoholic Hoover G. Stallion (played expertly by unknown actor Bear #1), who is the closest the play has to a hero. Meanwhile Stallion's ex-wife Carla Foghorn-Stallion (The bear from Without a Paddle) is revived 78 years early from the cold-sleep she entered to escape extradition by Cheeto Corporation Zionists in an emergency procedure triggered by the unfortunate terraforming. With the planet she loved turned to a pear and the CCZ still in full strength, Foghorn-Stallion finds herself launched into the dangerous world of the "undersea airline" a secret network of Neo-Vegans who offer room and board to known enemies of the CCZ looking for freedom in the no man's land located at the newly forged pear tip of the planet.
Carrey said of the play after its premier, "It was the kind of thing which could have only been done with bears, see, the human actor is too self-aware, is enslaved by his very humanity, which is why only bears could play these roles and why they played them so spectacularly well. There is an early scene where Stallion eats thirty pounds of chocolate... it was one of the first I wrote... we tried it with a human... to great disappointment, and I had this tremendous struggle with myself about it, because I knew that we had to establish his chocoholism in a viscerally disgusting and provocative way or it just wouldn't be real, like here is this living, breathing being, who cannot wake up and go about his day without painfully shoveling thirty pounds of chocolate down his throat, I mean we've all been there, we know what it's like and we feel for him. It was then that I looked myself in the mirror and said "Godsfuckit Alvin, your going to stop pandering to the producers right now, you're going to kick these primates to the curb and get some honest to goodness goddamn bears and do it the way it was intended!" and so we got these bears and all I know is that I slept much sounder after rehearsals."
Associated Press writer William Kinch in Juneau contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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