Time Out New York 12/99
New York Times 12/14/99

Jeff Goode's "Poona the Fuckdog" starring Frank Ensenberger and Erin Quinn Purcell
From Time Out New York 12/99

The wise ass pranksters at the adobe theatre company picked the perfect title. It brings to mind the best of their productions: self-mocking, off-color comedies that aim to entertain and make no apologies for it.

"Poona The Fuckdog and Other Plays for Children" is sometimes a gleeful send-up of the fairy tale genre, but Jeff Goode's play suffers from the same pat morals and simple sanctimoniousness that it tries to mock.

Poona (the eminently watchable Erin Quinn Purcell) is the earnest canine protagonist, who's searching for her Prince Charming. In a series of cartoonish tales introduced by a calm narrator (Vin Knight), Poona frolics with various men and animals in a giant orgasm box. Her talents earn her sudden celebrity but also produce some moral dilemmas. The Man Who Could Sell Anything (Jay Rosenbloom)- a slippery character who not-so-subtly announces, "I'm the villain. I'm the evils of rampant consumerism"- bamboozles her into endorsing cigarettes. A few minutes later, to emphasize the effect that smoking has on kids, the man literally guns down a few toddlers. In another didactic story, Suzy-Suzy (Kathryn Langwell) is a precocious preteen who, when exposed to the alienating charms of video games and the Internet, turns into a bloodthirsty, post-Littleton killer. These obvious, trendy messages slow the show's string of laughs and undercut the goofy, politically incorrect spirit.

Jeremy Dobrish's production is at its best when poking fun at self-important theater people. Twice, actors break and turn to the audience to lament their small roles. Adobe stalwart Arthur Aulisi is particularly funny as a flustered thespian stuck playing a shrub that sits downstage. Dobrish, blessed with a wicked sense of humor, also throws in some wonderfully loony touches, like the inspired casting of a rock-jawed midget, Peter Dinklage(Living In Oblivion), as the handsome Prince. His deadpan
performance is worth the price of admission.

Predictably, Goode's giddy play falters when it tries to teach us something. Nothing ruins a good story quite like a heavy-handed moral. Poona the Fuckdog does not live up to its name, but to be fair, how could it?

Beware If Smart Dog Gets Lonely

'Poona the F*ckdog,' at the Ohio Theater
New York Times 12/14/99
D. J. R. BRUCKNER
12/14/99

Trust the Adobe Theater Company to drive from mind any inkling of how oppressive these official holidays can be. If you can make it to their new play at the Ohio Theater by Saturday, its last day, the fix should hold you right through Jan. 1. It is called "Poona the . . . Dog and Other Plays for Children (Not a Play for Children)." Not only is the full title not printable here, neither are the names of a couple of characters. But there are in fact two children in it, and it is impossible to imagine that they come out of the experience scandalized or jaded.

If the Off Broadway plays "Duet! A Romantic Fable" and "Maybe Baby, It's You" represent high-minded good humor uptown, this is its lowdown downtown mode, and it is irresistible. The playwright, Jeff Goode, uses the technique of children's stories to send up children's stories, advertising, politics, religion, runaway capitalism, television, the Internet, the news media and a lot more, including waiters in New York restaurants.

He's not always right on target, but that hardly matters: Jeremy Dobrish, the artistic director of Adobe, who is in charge here, appears to direct by simply unleashing the unruly imaginations of the 15 actors and certainly that of Bernard Grenier, whose costumes include startlingly beautiful giant realizations of seldom-seen body parts. It is characteristic of the humor of this group of entertainers that there is only a single rude word in the entire dialogue and not one obscene gesture. If you come away with lurid thoughts, you know whose fault that is, and it is unlikely many people leave feeling a trace of guilt.

Erin Quinn Purcell, who starred in "Duet," is a wonderful naïf as the title character, a dog who is lonely until it learns what everyone expects from it, learns so well, in fact, that it gets a Heisman trophy. Ms. Purcell, a veteran Adobian, may have met her match in Peter Dinklage as the Handsome Prince Poona falls for. A newcomer to Adobe, Mr. Dinklage, letting the audience know he is an important figure, stirs waves of laughter before he says a word; in fact, the sheer force of his stage presence excites some of
the mirth, and he knows how to exploit it with every gesture.

There are no lame performances, although a couple of angels seem a bit pale next to the vivid dragons, animals, human television sets and computers, not to mention God, who inhabit this odd excursion. But in retrospect Vin Knight as a children's storyteller who goes berserk when a story happens without his
telling it, Arthur Halpern as a frog maître de leading a hapless diner to a restaurant table and Arthur Aulisi as a self-doubting philosophical shrub that in James Bond fashion outwits two pruners bent on a chain-saw massacre are so vivid they keep popping up in the imagination for days.

As for action, there is plenty: the nuking of an entire nation, revolutions, Super Bowls, volcanic dragon eruptions, family murders and the machine-gunning of children by runaway cigarettes. The fact that virtually every movement by every actor gets loud audience approval says a lot about
how light heavy things are in the hands of this company.