Fickle farce NewGate’s on-again-off-again Polish Joke BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Polish Joke By David Ives. Directed by Brien Lang. With Michael A. LoCicero, Steve Lynch, Joe Ouellette, Clare Blackmer, and Alana Sousa-Pullan. At NewGate Theatre through May 14.

Playwright David Ives grew up in Mametville, the same Chicago neighborhood of the chronicler of tough guys. Now I don’t know if David Mamet, four years older than him, actually beat him up as a kid, but Ives writes like someone well practiced in joking his way into keeping his lunch money.

Ives is well known around here, mostly through 2nd Story Theatre, for his trenchantly funny one-act plays. They tend to take off on the absurd difficulties people get into when they try to get hold of this spinning world or an equally dizzying love relationship. NewGate Theatre is presenting Polish Joke, one of Ives’s rare longer plays. The troupe does a good job playing Keystone Kops at a laff riot. But the on-again-off-again comedy itself gives them the impossible task of herding krazy kats.

The opening is pure, droll Ives. It’s a flashback to when our antihero, Jasiu Sadlowski (Michael A. LoCicero), was 9 and back in Da Bush, the Polish neighborhood in Chicago where he grew up. With his father slumped behind him in a lawn chair, beer-obliviated, he’s listening, rapt, to his Uncle Roman (Steve Lynch), who is explaining to him the world and his shoulder-hunched place in it. "I’m gonna tell you something now that will guide your entire life. All the wisdom you ever need to know: All Polish jokes are true."

Uncle Roman goes on about his insight that "Polacks are the punch line of Western civilization." That sense of meaningless the boy feels several times a week? It’s the Polish Gong ringing through his soul. Polish jokes, of which we get several, go back at least as far as Shakespeare (Polonius), the boy is informed. An egg and salt in beer? That sausage mania? Even the cannibals in Borneo, Uncle Roman sputters, don’t eat duck blood soup.

When we see him next, Jasiu had changed his name to John Sadler. (I couldn’t find out what Ives’s name was originally.) He’s a Yale grad up for a six-figure job at the World Bank, being interviewed by an intense Wasp woman (Clare Blackmer) with a not-too hidden agenda. What ethnicity exactly is Sadler, hmmm? He loses the job to a Flanagan, who is of acceptable national origins. (As his uncle had informed him, "Being Jewish is an art. Being Irish is a social skill.")

The opening scene is comical but realistic, the next farcical, and the next downright surreal. Jasiu encounters a freshly arrived Polish immigrant (Joe Ouellette) who is wearing a miner’s lamp strapped to his forehead. He has tunneled from Poland, since he didn’t know that Communism had fallen and he could fly here. To top it off, he locked his keys in his car and his family was locked in for an hour (a Polish joke we’d heard before). The tone next shifts again, to soul-searching seriousness — to a different play, actually. We are back at Jasiu’s high school seminary days, when he was thinking of becoming a priest and his mentor (Lynch doing a Godfather rasp) is trying to talk him out of dropping out.

This play is best when it owns up to its loopy premise and rollicks ahead full-tilt boogying. So when Jasiu decides to change his name to Flanagan and move to Ireland, we’re all the happier for it. The farcical tone works better here because it has more to draw from. Lynch has a grand old time as a stage Irishman, spouting "top o’ the marnin’ " at more than every opportunity. Blackmer is very funny as a hunched-over crone, spouting colorful Celtic similes as briskly as a colt frisking on an emerald meadow the marnin’ he kicks his churlish master over the fence. (Try one. They’re fun.) Alana Sousa-Pullan does a variation on the several seductresses she plays here. This time she is a flirtatious colleen waiting, she says, for the bloated corpse of her betrothed to wash ashore so that she can be available for the strapping likes of this handsome lad.

LoCicero is on the money as the vacillating Jasiu, now and then adding subtle touches, fleeting expressions mostly, that round out what could be a comic-book-flat character. Directed by Brien Lang, his support does well, especially Lynch by giving his several characters comic variety.

Polish Joke comes on like a favorite funny uncle — think Rodney Dangerfield rather than raconteur — who stays longer than usual, sometimes wearing out his welcome, but sometimes redeeming himself with a howler everybody slaps a knee over. David Ives is at his best writing sketches rather than scenes. The best bits here could have made a good one-act play.