Review: SLUGS wriggles into an anarchic world of clowning, theatre, puppetry, rave energy, and “bad ideas”
At PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, the Creepy Boys duo who created and perform the show, want to make sure it’s about nothing, nothing, nothing, except fun, fun, fun,
Creepy Boys’ Sam Kruger and S.E. Grummett in SLUGS.
PuSh Performing Arts Festival presented SLUGS at the Nest to January 31
AS PART OF THE usual preshow housekeeping about silencing your phone and supporting the arts, the audience is asked, “Would you like to live in a world where SLUGS exists?”
The performance that follows wriggles its way into that administrative question. SLUGS starts from a premise that sounds easier than it is. S.E. Grummett and Sam Kruger, the Creepy Boys duo who created and perform the show, want to make sure it’s about nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing, except fun, fun, fun, they sing early on in one of many silly, satirical, and undeniably catchy songs of the night. The show almost immediately begins to argue with itself.
SLUGS has been moving through festivals for long enough to have picked up a reputation. Its unruly jumble of clowning, theatre, puppetry, rave energy, and “bad ideas” pursued too far makes for the kind of work that finds its home in festivals where risk is welcome.
It’s not hard to see why it keeps playing to full rooms. A certain leap of faith is required, but it helps that the Creepy Boys are clearly confident and incredibly malleable physical and vocal performers. They generate a sense of momentum quickly, as well as something like trust, even—and maybe especially—when their on-stage antics feel tense, awkward, or sticky in the body.
The show opens with throbbing techno music blasting and a distorted voice filtered through remix and vocoder: “Slugs? Not in my patio!” The titular slugs arrive writhing, wreaking havoc, shedding their invertebrate skins, sleeping bags, as they go. The weird, vaguely unappealing quality of their existence clings to them like a slime trail, or an existential chip on their shoulder.
Which raises the question the show keeps maniacally circling: can a performance really be about nothing? And what’s the point? As “somethings” inevitably start to seep their way in—gender identity and culture’s fixation on labels, comedians pulling out their dicks at inappropriate moments, the economic precarity of artists—it becomes quickly obvious to everyone except the excitable and borderline compulsive performers onstage that the answer is “No.”
Grummett and Kruger push the premise as if seeing how long it will take before it buckles, piling on gross gags (front-row audiences beware), bodily overexposure, and self-conscious references to their own art and creative process.
There’s a palpable atmosphere and a tension humming underneath the entire time, as you find yourself laughing hard out of nervousness or discomfort or just plain morbid curiosity to see what comes next. It’s the opposite of precious, but it also, paradoxically, feels like it was created with care.
There’s a lot of technical precision sitting alongside the show’s unapologetic DIY sensibility, and what initially reads as excess turns out to be more controlled than it looks. The catchy songs, the forward-driving techno music, the paper puppets and lo-fi animation, and the seamless live-fed projection that zooms in on certain moments feel less like embellishments than especially sound structural supports.
Developed in collaboration with artists including dramaturg Caleigh Crow, musical comic Shirley Gnome, and puppeteer Zach Dorn, the work moves with a kind of collective intelligence. The craft behind the scenes gives shape to the madcap and unrestrained onstage energy of the duo and also makes fun, busy work of keeping it alive rather than letting it curdle.
Of course, Slugs won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. I suspect the show’s final shenanigan, the one that finally rips open theatre’s protective membrane rather than simply slobbering all over it, as it does throughout the rest of the show, will be the last straw for anyone already inclined to recoil from it.
As for me, I’m ready to vouch for the existence of Slugs without hesitation. 
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