Old rugged crossover

Some of the most exciting work in theater and comedy of late has come from the blurry border between the two genres. Last spring’s Steve and Jordan, Respectively was iO-caliber sketch comedy coupled with metacommentary on modern vaudeville. The Best Church of God, recently closing its open run, congregated seemingly unrelated vignettes, creating a dynamic weekly theater experience. Recently, theater and comedy’s coexistence has begot commingling, in all the right ways.

The Annoyance Theatre factors heavily into this trend; here’s a place open to staging live comedic theater and simultaneously breaking the rules of the medium. Its theater is scrappy, accessible and currently receiving accolades. Love Is Dead, last year’s musical homage to romance and necrophilia, recently took home a citation for outstanding music and lyrics from the FringeNYC festival. Interestingly, comedians Andrew Hobgood and James Asmus conceived the show as an experiment: Do an Annoyance-style shocker-with-a-heart as much like a legit musical as possible, categorization be damned.

Hobgood and Asmus hope to continue the trend on a more regular basis: Along with Evan Linder and Gary Tiedemann, the pair has founded the New Colony, a theater company dedicated to taking the groundwork established by the Annoyance to other buildings and theatrical styles, Hobgood says. With Amelia Earhart Jungle Princess, the company debuts at the National Pastime Theater.

Hobgood hopes the work will excite regular theatergoers and sway apprehensive would-be theatergoers—those who find it hard to resist the allure of a TiVo full of Dexter. “It feels like theater audiences are shrinking,” says Hobgood, who works in the accounting office at Victory Gardens. “A lot of them think it’s boring, long and uninteresting. Part of that is [theater has] to compete with all other forms of media. As audiences evolve, theater has to evolve with them. Look at the iPod—if it doesn’t have the feature you want, you wait a few years and there’s the feature.”

In Jungle Princess, an American expedition discovers Amelia Earhart has crash-landed in the jungle. They bring her back as a PR stunt, which forces Earhart to confront the person she once was and didn’t like. It’s a tried-and-true Annoyance trick to hook audience members with what seems to be a one-joke pony, then sneak-attack them with a resonant story and themes—in this case, an identity struggle from someone who’s lost her humanity.

The show was created Annoyance-style by providing actors with character shells, empowering them to flesh out their roles through improv. And if the FringeNYC reaction to Love Is Dead was no accident—Hobgood recalls seeing an “80-year-old man slapping his wife with laughter about sex with a dead girl”— it’s clear this comedy-theater love child might be what we’ve been looking for.

Discover Amelia Earhart Jungle Princess Monday 29.