Nothing Natural About It

Last year, Sean Owens produced a theatrical soiree made up of a series of short plays so dementedly different that looking back on the experience, it's a wonder that the constituent parts of Odd By Nature fitted together into a coherent whole at all, but they did. Over the course of the production, playwright/director/performer Owens and his careening ensemble cast performed, among other things, a monologue about being buried alive by a cute gay man, a skit in a fancy French restaurant modeled after the nursery rhyme "There was an old woman who swallowed a fly," and a lecture set at a prim Victorian ladies' club meeting about the "revivifying effects" of a giant vibrator. The performance even involved musician Don Seaver playing piano in a pair of oven gloves. Owens gives his Noel Coward–meets–Eddie Izzard wit another outing with his new sequel, Odd By Nature II: The Stranger Journeys. Exploring the dramatic possibilities of everything from a ménage a cinque in a ski resort to an encounter between Virginia Woolf and Diane Arbus at Disneyland, it promises to be even more surreal than the original.
Feb. 8-24