The Houston Press
awards Theater LaB Houston
its "Best of Houston" 2001
Best
Traveling Show
Spymonkey's
Stiff...undertaking Undertaking at Theater LaB
A tiny European troupe of actors who call themselves Spymonkey leaped into
Houston this past spring and landed with a hysterical thump at Theater
LaB. Their naughty, limber clowning glittered with Monty Python-style
absurdity and Addams Family spookiness, but what else would you expect
from a show about the burial business called Stiff...undertaking Undertaking?
Under the macabre direction of Cal McCrystal, the wild group of actors,
including Toby Park, Aitor Bassauri, Stephen Kreiss and Petra Massey, took giddy
delight in creating a hysterical nightmare about the Graves Funeral Home, where
a poor bereaved husband meets up with the most morbidly funny morticians to come
along in quite a while. The foursome of goofy characters created a
perfectly awful and wildly funny funereal experience as they hammered out
headstones and painted over the "ugily bugily" faces of the
unfortunate corpses who ended up on their slabs. Happily, this group only
exists on stage. Hopefully, they'll bring their strangeness back to town
in the not-so-distant future.
