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I’m Sticking With Kiefer...
That exchange about sums up both the play and Varteniuk’s humour in general (the latter of which is most often on display with Mostly Water Theatre, whose core and associates Varteniuk has called on here): streaked with pop cultural references, Varteniuk thrives on playing absurd situations like they were the most natural thing in the world, such as having two Hollywood icons earnestly debate the artistic merits of Star Wars slash fiction and conversely turning the natural into something ridiculous, such as telling a basic morality story through the eyes of an almost-forgotten bit of pop cultural ephemera.
In particular, Varteniuk examines the choices facing Lou Diamond Phillips (Dave DeGagné) on the set of the Brat Pack Western Young Guns. The deeper moral choice here comes in the form of competing script offers from the Estevez/Sheen clan, represented by thick-headed fratbully Emilio (Trent Wilkie) and earneast but beleaugered Charlie (Matt Stanton), and Kiefer Sutherland (Craig Buchert), a well-intentioned charmer who nevertheless employs some questionable tactics in helping Lou figure his life out. Will the earnest, eager Lou go with Men at Work, Emilio’s lowest-common-denominator script about garbagemen who don’t care about nuthin’, or Kiefer’s more challenging Renegades, which demands Lou play into his quickly developing Native American/Mexican stereotype? Obviously here, Lou’s choice is largely a Macguffin designed to let the Mostly Water gang goof around for a good hour and a half in character. Not really so much caricatures as broadly drawn sketches taped to somewhat-recognizable names. This fact isn’t to the play’s detriment though: removed for the most part from any responsibility to reality—save a few slightly tweaked biographical facts—the group can mostly just play, occasionally dipping in to parody when needed, but more often content to go for pure funny.
Varteniuk once told me in an interview that the key to sketch comedy was making sure at least a third of it was funny—you could have more if you liked, but so long as audiences were laughing 33 per cent of the time, they’d forget the boring bits after the show—and for the most part I’m Sticking With Kiefer follows that kind of formula. A decent amount of the scripts gags actually miss the mark—a scene where Emilio and Charlie act out part of Men at Work is really nothing more than a piss-take at a piss-poor film, and Donald Sutherland is played far too wacky—but even if they aren’t outnumbered by the funnier parts, they’re certainly overshadowed. Kiefer’s bellowing justification for repeatedly sleeping with Lou’s wives, for instance, plays perfectly off their established characters, while even more subtle touches, like interspersing the story with bits from Bon Jovi’s “Blaze of Glory” (the theme song for Young Guns II, if you didn’t know) also strike a chord.
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