Breaking The Jell-O Mold

By Richard Zoglin

The three bullet-headed, blue-colored actors move about the stage in eerie, wordless unison. They bang away at kettledrums while squeezing tubes of paint onto the drumheads, creating volcanic eruptions of color. They stuff handfuls of Cap'n Crunch cereal into their mouths, then join in a symphony of amplified chomping. They entice an audience member onstage for a banquet of Twinkies; suddenly cream filling spurts out of their chests. By the end of the evening, with strobe lights flashing and electronic music pulsing, the audience is engulfed by a tidal wave of crepe paper streaming from the balcony.

Don't try to understand it. Nothing Blue Man Group does makes much conventional sense. The troupe's 80-minute theater piece, called Tubes, is a potpourri of physical stunts, visual gags, art commentary, audience participation and all-out sensory assault. In the '60s it might have been called a happening; today the preferred term is performance art. Whatever, it is the most talked-about off-Broadway show of the season -- and the most bracingly original.

Explaining Blue Man Group is no easy task. Take the Blue Men themselves. They are expressionless and robotic, yet oddly childlike and endlessly creative: a tripartite Buster Keaton, dropped in from Saturn. Some of the bits are overtly satirical (a dead fish on a canvas is the subject for a high-toned art critique, which scrolls by on an electronic message board). Others are raucously playful. One of the Blues tosses what appears to be marshmallows across the stage to a comrade, who catches them with his mouth and stuffs them inside like a huge wad of bubble gum. An audience member is hauled up onstage, dressed in a white jumpsuit and helmet, and taken backstage, where a video camera shows him getting suspended by his feet, splashed with blue paint and bounced against a canvas. He reappears onstage with his head encased in a mold of orange Jell-O. (It's a bit of Blue Man trickery: the fellow manhandled backstage is actually a pretaped double. The Jell-O, however, is real.)

"We are trying to create an art playground," says Chris Wink, one of the three 30-year-old New Yorkers who formed Blue Man Group in 1988. Their backgrounds are as unexpected as the show. Wink, who used to write synopses of articles for a Japanese magazine, dubs himself a "disillusioned futurist." Phil Stanton was a drummer and an aspiring actor who met Wink when they worked together for a catering company. Matt Goldman, a high school friend of Wink's, got an M.B.A. and worked as a computer-software producer before joining the group.

They began doing their Blue Man act on the sidewalks of New York City, once setting up shop opposite the Copacabana nightclub and enticing the overflow crowd to their own alternative "Club Nowhere." Later they moved indoors to various performance spaces in Manhattan. They created Tubes (named for the industrial tubing that snakes along the theater walls, hangs from the ceiling and laps up onstage) in early 1991 for the La MaMa experimental theater, then restaged it at the Astor Place Theater in November.

The group is getting offers to take its blue humor overseas (since most of it is wordless, the language barrier is minimal). For the time being, though, they have settled in for what is shaping up as an extended run. "Up until now, we were always building the props and wrapping the wires right up to the last minute," says Wink. "This is the first time we've had a chance to work on our craft."

It is still a labor-intensive show. The three arrive at the theater at noon to help prepare the props for the evening show. A fresh Jell-O mold is delivered every day, and 1,500 ft. of recycled crepe paper is wound onto rollers for each performance. The blue makeup takes nearly two hours to apply; the actors do it themselves. Once the show is over, they hang around for another couple of hours, helping clean up the nightly mess.

The group members wax philosophical about their chosen color ("Blue has an emotional complexity: a severe quality, but also a softness"); their alienation from the '80s ("We felt like outsiders, but we were steeped in the culture"); and their desire to "blesh" with the audience (the word, a combination of blend and mesh, comes from Theodore Sturgeon's sci-fi novel More Than Human). But their show is refreshingly free of intellectual cant and artistic pretension. One can hunt for precursors -- the populist subversiveness of Penn and Teller; the visual inventiveness of Squat Theater -- but the troupe seems to have sprung, well, out of the blue. "This is a celebration of the act of creation," says Wink. For the audience, it's just a celebration.