Prologue
Maybe it's not a good idea to preface this by saying I have been flat on my couch with swollen glands and a sore throat since Tuesday. If you sat next to me last night, please do not be angry. It's just that the Nature Theater of Oklahoma so enchanted me last year that not even the hot knives that fillet my tonsils every time I swallow could keep me away. (Also, the amount of audience coughing I heard during Donna Uchizono and Kassys suggests that T:BA has been attended by a number of worldly viruses as well as people.) (Also, I am beyond the contagion point.)

My point being: No Dice is a do-not-miss event. Even if you don't think you feel totally up for it. Even at four hours long. Even though they kindly let in a few more of us than could actually fit, and some of us sat on the floor in front of the seats, cushioned from the concrete by thick folded PICA hoodies (thanks, Erin.) You should really go. Get there early, because the line is formidable.

Sandwiches
I didn't realize it until they stepped out to introduce the show, but the people making us sandwiches included Pavol Liska (below) and Kelly Copper, the directors.

A sandwich on soft white bread is a perfect theater snack. Delicious and aurally unobtrusive.

DIALOGUE
The Nature Theater of Oklahoma does exactly what you are never supposed to do with dialogue: use it verbatim. As anyone who has ever written journalism, fiction, plays, police reports, et cetera knows, people are barely coherent. We stop, restart, trail off, hesitate, repeat ourselves, ramble, sigh, search for words, use the wrong ones. So the dialogue we are used to seeing performed is super-distilled and crafted (and for that we can be thankful.) But Nature Theater goes the other way--they go for the whole raw material of conversation, and instead of sifting out the nuggets, they take the unwieldy verbatim mass and tease meaning out of every awkward particle of it.

This could be a horrible disaster. It could be the most boring theater you've ever seen in your life. But instead, it's perplexing, and then amusing, and then illuminating. As "dialogue," it's often banal, flecked with wit (just like so many of our conversations.) But the delivery transforms it. The actors sometimes speak with bizarre and obviously fake accents (French, Irish, Jamaican); they use exaggerated facial expressions; they incorporate "found gestures" (many recognizable from last year's Ballet Brut). Anne Gridley in particular, tiny and fishnet-stockinged, with a wild auburn wig, has a way of delivering and then reacting to her own lines as if she can't believe they've just left her mouth, or are in fact at this moment leaving her mouth.

What you come to realize, watching this, is how anxious and afraid humans are, and how this fear constantly guides or dismantles our attempts to communicate.

Words
"What do we require to enjoy ourselves in a social sense?" asks Kristin Worrall--who wears a rumpled Marie Antoinette wig and black Ray-bans, and for whom you could not draw a better face for her silent, lurking organist role--when she finally speaks. "We don't want to just enjoy ourselves alone. We want to enjoy ourselves with other people."

She goes on to say, "One might describe a civilization in"--and then my notes stop because I realize I am getting approached by Anne Gridley for some intense one-on-one audience/actor interaction, but I think the rest was something like in terms of the conversations it has. Or, One might describe a civilization in terms of the quality of its conversations.

And if these conversations among the actors and their families and friends are a barometer of our/their slice of civilization right now, the recurring concerns are food, the peculiarity of work, anxiety about money, and negative desires: desire to not have to think at all, to expend no energy with body or brain, and to not need. But also dinner theater and tubs of Kozy Shack pudding.

ALSO
"People expect to have a story to go with storytelling. And in this day and age, it's up for debate if that's really necessary."

"Having second thoughts about your life's mission?"
"I wish I'd had first thoughts about it."

"There's a lot that can be conveyed in just an uh-huh." (And what follows fantastically deconstructs it.)

MOVES
At a few points in the show, the Nature Theater players burst into dance. It's comic relief, but also necessary--an outburst of nonverbal, purely physical energy. The one wearing the cape and pointy ears who looks like a scared Totoro and never speaks suddenly starts beatboxing into a loop pedal; the bearded Hasidic pirate moves with surprising fluidity that belies his Dickies and torn sneakers; the mustachioed blonde shirtless guy's whole body zigzags in every way and direction. It's suprising, and funny, and so wildly, instantly, effortlessly entertaining, it's no wonder they can pull off such a formidable and strange project as No Dice.

P.S.
I thought the M&M dance was a good idea. I hope they make a lot of money off it.

--Chelsey Johnson