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By Hannah Lipman/Substack at @hannahlipman.
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Published on April 10, 2025
Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein. Photo: Maria Baranova
Choreographers and directors: Lisa Fagan & Lena Engelstein
Performers: Lena Engelstein, Lisa Fagan, Marianne Rendón
Production Stage Management: Daniel Nelson | Sound Design by: Tei Blow | Lighting Design by: Masha Tsimring | Scenic Design by: Jian Jung | Costume Design by: Normandy Sherwood
Creative Producers: Emma Orme | Production Manager: Karl Allen | Dramaturgist: Iris McCloughan
Props Designer: Hannah Bird | Associate Scenic Designer: Josh Oberlander | Associate Sound Designer: Lola Basiliere | Assistant Lighting Designer: Maxley
March 27 - 29 2025
I know not everyone grew up with a gaggle of friends who put on performances in the living room between the ages of 5 and 10, but I definitely did. As my friends and I wiggled our hips and lip-synched to garish music in costumes foraged from the depths of our parents’ closets, we dared our meager audiences to applaud. The operation of juvenile showmanship didn’t just guarantee attention, it fostered a mysterious realm of creative anarchy.
Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein’s Friday Night Rat Catchers functions with a kindred spirit; its youthful irreverence and penchant for comedic chaos a pleasure to behold. The work interrogates and unearths the confusing truths of adulthood through their satiric dance lens, its bubbling acuity demanding total attention.
The wacky, nuanced performance unfolds as a game show gone awry. Our host, Marianne Rendón, serves us a charismatic Johnny Carson-esque caricature as she tap dances and croons Patsy Cline’s Crazy in a powder blue suit. Rendón guzzles sky-high coffee cups, adding each new cup to her stack, and recites the tagline for Snickers while shoving them into her teeth as the underbelly of her dissatisfaction with the fictional commercial TV network surfaces. She straddles the line between relishing her duties and loathing them; the incremental debasement of her amiability ignites a slurry of questions about hierarchical frameworks. Will her leadership prevail? Rendón’s swaggering stride meets a hunger for recognition as she finger guns the audience, surveying us and proudly mistranslating our answers into her microphone, exposing the flimsy facade to her fun and games.
Fagan explores this charade deftly, prancing across the tightrope of earnestness and black comedy with acute sensitivity. Dressed in a yellow babydoll dress and a diaper, she elicits raucous laughter as she dances to Lee Hazelwood’s Fool Loves a Fool (1966). Échappé-ing, relevé-ing, swimming through the air, and twerking, Fagan melds ballet and boogie with signifiers of maturity, her body emitting an exuberant fusion of drama and solemnity. As the music fades, she marches side to side, saluting the audience in silence as her percussive footsteps grow increasingly aggressive. She seems to beg us to salute in response, summoning a sentiment of silent, lonesome entrapment within her topsy-turvy world.
As Fagan swings and flings her doll, sits down on a tiny pink sticker-covered chair, and opens up her kid's backpack to shove Fruit Loops into her mouth, the portrayal of childhood through the conduit of an adult becomes exceedingly complex. As she attempts to garner our attention and applause, the universal desperation for validation emerges. She confides in us, saying, “Maybe we could go for a lil bite… I don’t have a wallet, there’s gotta be a wallet here,” gesticulating toward us with the nonchalance of an experienced hustler. Her portrayal of infancy is so convincing, while disarmingly tongue-in-cheek, that it dismantles the distinctions between childhood and adulthood. The masquerade incites contemplation of the inner child, actual kids, and the tumult of growing up. Twirling her plastic baby keys around her finger, she bites them, her eyes glinting as she tactfully toys with her masquerade of immaturity.
When Engelstein enters in a trenchcoat under ominous dark blue lighting, the hilarity and obscurity of the show reach new heights. With each step and shuffle, rocks tumble from her statuesque form. Her face, stoic and blank, showcases her commitment to the slapstick shtick. The thudding beat of the onslaught of rocks cultivates an uncanny stream of music. Her lightened load proves to be a relief as she crumples to the ground, curling in on herself to mimic her fallen innards. As the vignette concludes, Engelstein’s makeshift rock garden surrounds her, the contents of her outfit scattered around the stage. A phone rings through the theatre and she takes the call from one of the rocks, exiting stage left. Upon return, she walks a giant pet rock, dragging it around on a leash as she chats on her iPhone. When she bends down with a doggy bag and picks up one of the rocks from earlier, now transformed into her pet rock’s poop, it’s impossible not to laugh. Again and again, Engelstein and Fagan prove themselves masters of physical comedy, their vignettes chock full of imaginative punchlines and propwork.
Their humorous techniques carry over into explorations of collective technological dependency. Engelstein launches into an exhaustive dance break centered around a frantic search for her AirPods, screaming, “Where are my pods?! My pods, where are they?!” Her harried energy is a magnified iteration of everyday inconvenience as she lateral T’s, swings her arms, and dramatically penchés to 80’s electro-pop instrumentation. The sequence concludes with Engelstein discovering her “pods” in, of all places, her pants pockets. Soon after, the duo rush to the back of the stage to flatten themselves along the wall, suckling from large canisters akin to hamster water bottles. As they push each other away, furiously gasping for hydration, we witness a magnification of their hunger and the unshakable primal instinct to consume.
Their insatiability appears front and center in the final disco dance scene in which the pair dress in fabulous gogo dancing outfits. They shimmy and shake under disco balls while imbibing and chowing down — a hedonist’s dreamscape. As they nosh on shrimp cocktail and pulverize Fruit Loops and champagne in a blender, I am reminded of Daisies, the 1966 Czechoslovakian movie famous for the similarly chaotic, gluttonous, and brilliantly feminist antics of its two beautiful girls. As Rendón re-enters to bid us adieu, she puts on a brown wig as big as her whole body, transforming into a blue-suited Chewbacca. As she feeds her hairy head a hamburger, I can only hope her hunger can be satisfied, though I suspect it never will be.
