Fatboy

FAT LADY STINGS Engstrom weighs heavily on Pickering.

PHOTO: MICHAEL BROSILOW

Fatboy is hungry. Fatboy is always fucking hungry. Fatboy lives to consume, and when his equally corpulent, equally foul-mouthed wife, Fudgie, tells him there’s no more food and no more money, she gives him a choice: Start eating the furniture, asshole, or go find some money. He returns covered in blood, but with fistfuls of cash.

Clancy’s gleefully rule-breaking Punch-and-Judy show is loosely inspired by Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry’s pre-absurdist indictment of bourgeoisie complacency, a take on Macbeth in which the title character murders the king of Poland; in his ineptitude and drive for power, he’s soon killing allies as well as enemies. The important difference in Fatboy’s initial action is that his target’s not a king, but common people. As Fatboy’s campaign of consumption continues, it becomes clear—subtly at first, but soon outright—that Fatboy’s focus is America’s own excess. Fatboy may be taking over countries for their pancakes, not their oil, but the point is hard to miss.

It’s also funny as hell, thanks to a merrily metatheatrical self-consciousness (as when Fatboy complains during his trial that he’s being upstaged: “I am Fatboy, and I am titular!”) and blithe profanity (“my enemies, a cabal of cock-sucking whores, lash out at me even here!”). The game Pickering, sweating his balls off in an enormous fat suit, is terrifically offensive, and we mean that as a compliment, but he’s nearly outshone in repellency by Engstrom’s virtuosic bitch. They’re both great. The fuckers.