News-Letter

What can one say walking out of the fall Throat Culture show,
aptly called "Tolerable Cruelty: JHU's Fall 2006 Racial Sensitivity
Workshop," other than, well, what can I say? This show, designed to be
a mockery of the recent diversity issues on campus, left its audience
members wondering exactly what they had walked into. This was the
second of two Throat Culture shows this year, the first being a
compilation of two years worth of work. It was reported that this
performance was the first time the whole group had seen the show in its
entirety.

As always, Throat Culture aimed to offend all parties equally,
featuring skits with topics of diversity, obesity, cancer,
homosexuality, human trafficking and late-term (51st trimester?)
abortion.

But the audience, once past the initial knee-jerk reactions to
some of the rather unpolished and crude dialogue, seemed less
enthralled than they had walking in. The question on everyone's mind at
intermission seemed to be, "Whose humor is this?" As one student
remarked, "Pleasingly offensive ... sort of." In terms of topics, the
focus was solely "diversity;" few skits featured anything political or
situational.

Missing were the off-kilter but original themes of shows past
such as "Orange Versus Grapefruit," "Facebook the Musical" or "Hopkins
Shuttle Driver." If their intention was to provide comic relief to and
poke fun at the stressful and politically correct culture of Hopkins,
Throat Culture missed their mark. The main flaw was not that the show
was overly offensive and caused an uproarious clamor after every scene
but that the comedic timing and script were not strong enough to create
the desired response to the risquÈ issues it framed. While the skits
aimed to be tongue-in-cheek, few succeeded; most were borderline
tasteless and too heavy with elaborate death sequences (complete with a
Shakespeare-esque soliloquy) to be laughable. The silence after nearly
all but three skits was not reflective of shock and horror at the
issues as one would have expected, but rather of a clueless audience
who understood the setup but were still waiting for the joke. For lack
of a better term, Throat Culture was deficient in diversity of topics
and styles of humor.

But, where taste, preparation and technical prowess were
visibly absent, there was a plethora of talented actors and some
notable new faces. Freshman Eric Levitz gave the best deadpan Hopkins
has seen in years and Richard Zheng far outshined his co-stars with his
effervescence and animation.

The directors of Throat Culture know they can rely on
sophomores Mike Wills, Bill Fuller and Zoe Bell to deliver nearly any
scene, no matter how ambiguous, (though there are some that not even
Mike Wills as a pot-smoking Jesus Christ can save) and used these key
players often. Though it had its high points, the performance was
lacking the cohesion and wit of past shows and relied too heavily on
pseudo-scandalous social taboos and seemingly improvised strings of
monologue.

Ultimately the show was saved by snappy one-liners about
freshman girls, tolerance-bots and the overall excitement of a
forgiving audience. The videos were also a highlight of the show,
particularly "Chipotle" and "An Awkward Love Story" because of their
originality. In terms of the next semester's show, the overwhelming
consensus among those leaving Arellano was to embrace the talents of
the group and return to the witty, sometimes obscure style of semesters
past and leave the cancer jokes for someone else to stumble over.

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