"A couple days after 9/11, I thought, 'Oh God, I guess I have to start engaging with the world," David Rees said. The creator of "Get Your War On," the popular Web-comic turned play now being put on by Rude Mechs at Woolly Mammoth, Rees became a news junkie, subscribing to periodicals of every political hue to try to make sense of what happened to the world after the attack on his adopted hometown of New York. What he found didn't please him, and he channeled his rage in to a comic strip featuring foul-mouthed office workers talking politics on the phone, saying things like "When [Henry Kissinger] signs a U.S. government paycheck, does he use a ballpoint pen, or the bloody, severed limb of an East Timorese child?" The theater production translates the strip expertly to stage, in all its one-dimensional ("visually and ideologically," quips Rees) glory.
The set is rudimentary, featuring five desks, each with a projector pointed at a giant screen behind the makeshift office environment. The actors used these projectors to display their comic strip analogues (non-descript people on telephones that the strip creator got from a public domain clipart database). Dates were also displayed, indicating what day the strip ran and what took place (which proves handy for checking particularly funny quotes after the show - the script is taken pretty much directly from the strip, found at www.getyourwaron.com). This strategy served another, slightly more depressing purpose - as the days rolled by, ad nauseum, the audience was forced to recognize just how long everything has been going on.
Most of "Get Your War On" operates in this style, with the entire production, minus some impressive lighting, coming across like a particularly well-done civics project by a sarcastic group of high school students. A few moments break this shoestring mood - one sequence features a stirring rendition of David Bowie's "Life on Mars," and at one point a man dressed as North Korea runs across the stage, begging for attention - but for the most part, everything is simple, which serves the show well, as the real attraction here is the dialogue.
The set is rudimentary, featuring five desks, each with a projector pointed at a giant screen behind the makeshift office environment. The actors used these projectors to display their comic strip analogues (non-descript people on telephones that the strip creator got from a public domain clipart database). Dates were also displayed, indicating what day the strip ran and what took place (which proves handy for checking particularly funny quotes after the show - the script is taken pretty much directly from the strip, found at www.getyourwaron.com). This strategy served another, slightly more depressing purpose - as the days rolled by, ad nauseum, the audience was forced to recognize just how long everything has been going on.
Most of "Get Your War On" operates in this style, with the entire production, minus some impressive lighting, coming across like a particularly well-done civics project by a sarcastic group of high school students. A few moments break this shoestring mood - one sequence features a stirring rendition of David Bowie's "Life on Mars," and at one point a man dressed as North Korea runs across the stage, begging for attention - but for the most part, everything is simple, which serves the show well, as the real attraction here is the dialogue.
