The last time I saw The Cody Rivers Show, I sat and clapped like crazy. At the end of their stunning performance at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, the audience cheered and cheered as we waited for someone to lead us all to our feet. No one got up, but the emotional din continued. It was as if the whole crowd was stricken with boners and we were all afraid to stand. Meanwhile, a breathless Andrew Connor and Mike Mathieu, the duo who comprise The Cody Rivers Show, hugged on stage and soaked up the applause like they were Broadway stars who’d just been tossed fresh Spring bouquets. We essentially gave them a sitdown-standing ovation—and it went on for a really long time.
The Cody Rivers Show is a bit of a welcome anomaly in the comedy world. It’s comedy, I suppose, but it’s derived by the calculations of two trained dancers and performance artists who manipulate the sketch genre to their whims. Their scenes are often long, filled with breakneck wordplay, fleeting footwork and a compositional structure that recalls the visionary worlds populated by characters in a Robert Wilson piece. But if I can dispense with the fluffy language for a second: When the Bellingham, Wash. residents perform here, you feel like someone invited these guys over to casually shoot some pool and then all of a sudden, they start banking spinny trick shots without calling a combo first.
“The primary thing that guides our creative process is a desire to make material that is unlike anything that we have seen or done before,” explains Connor, when I ask him about their show. “That’s a challenge that sometimes feels like it is getting perpetually more difficult. It occurred to me recently that I don’t think we are usually writing comedy. Our approach to creating is fundamentally about cultivating ideas that are unusual and interesting and weird, and then sprinkling in a little dash of funny to justify calling it a comedy show.”
Whether or not it needs justification, I gleefully look forward to seeing the boys appear on a calendar. For their latest effort, The Cody Rivers Show: Stick to Glue, they redress much of their favorite material in fresh devices. “We started working in a new style about a year and-a-half ago, creating distinct independent sketches, but threading narrative elements through the show to make them all relate to one another in some fashion,” Connor says. “The shows each had their own weird little story lines and esoteric unity. For this show we ripped these pieces out of the familiar comfort of their respective shows and reassembled them to create a new lineup with all of the dots reconnected in new ways with different sketches. We were already planning to rewrite most of the material for this tour, so in the process we changed characters and details and mutated this group of pieces into its own collection of strange little universes that make up the grand strange universe of the whole show.”
All this talk about universes made me wonder why, in all of the places in the universe, these two are living in Bellingham and not somewhere more commercially rewarding for the theater-minded (like NYC, for example). For artists like Andrew and Mike, the temptation to relocate to a big city is not even pinging on their priority list.
“We ended up in the small, rural-ish town that we live in sort of on a whim. It is a town that has a vibrant arts and culture scene for a place its size. The growth and success of The Cody Rivers Show caught us off-guard,” Connor says. “We hadn’t planned for it to become a career. It just sort of worked out that way, and it quickly became clear that we could develop new work at home in a place we love and then tour it on the road. So far, nothing even approaching a good reason, professionally speaking, has arisen to compel us to move to New York, L.A. or Chicago and endure the challenges that go along with big-city life. Plus, I think we enjoy the benefits of not being too closely enmeshed in the echo chamber of any particular scene, allowing us to keep our minds open.”
Last week, the two spent three-and-a-half days on a train from Vancouver to Toronto. They’ve embarked on a four-month summer tour, zigzagging across the United States and Canada by rail to perform in various small theaters and fringe festivals. They stop in New York for a few days before continuing on to D.C.
May 5 & 7, Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, 307 W. 26th St. (near 8th Ave.), 212-366-9176; 8, $5.
