The third offering in Third Eye Theatre Presents: Dylan Hillerman’s Grand Guignol is the sex farce Les Sniques (“The Sneakies”) written by David Ian and directed by Ira Kortum. Following the classic Grand Guignol formula, the audience first is given a comic sex farce to start out the evening, and then a graphic horror story and then back to comedy again to give a “hot and cold” feel during the performance.
Les Sniques (“The Sneakies”) presents us with an over the top look at infidelity and sex for thrills and also walks the fine line between horror and comedy using murder for lust as its tool. After all, if one is going to kill for gain, one should make certain exactly what it is that is being gained. Les Sniques (“The Sneakies”) presents us with the conundrum of pursuing the unattainable, the lure of the forbidden, and the loss of its desirability once it is captured. We find that the true joy was in the pursuit and not in the actual possession of the object of desire.
If Les Sniques (“The Sneakies”) was not a comedy, it could very easily be horror if the same elements and subject matter treated darkly instead of shining the light of absurdity upon it. In this way the comedy serves to subtly undermine our defenses against the horrific by encouraging us to suspend our disbelief against seeing death, murder, infidelity and betrayal, things we normally are exempting from witnessing directly and only hearing about through safer means and media. Having opened the minds of the audience members to accept these events as something we can collectively participate in, to actually want the murders to happen in order to complete the comic potential of the farce, the trap has been set for the audience to similarly participate in the upcoming horrific story and find that they want terrible things to happen as well that has tragic results.
At start we are given a couple clearly unhappy with each other and another visiting couple, with whom we find out one from each pair are engaging in extra marital trysts as close to under the noses of their counterparts as possible. Complications arise when one of these partners wants to possess the other instead of merely having the occasional fling. What does one do when the obligations of a conventional marriage gone sour interfere with the desire to explore and exploit intimacy with another? The answer in this sex farce is delightfully Grand Guignol: kill all those who are “in the way”.
The problem with killing for a solution is that if it doesn’t turn out to be a workable answer, there is no real going back. Or is there? Well, not without comic consequences, it turns out, and the remainder of the show takes us down that farcical road farther than we might at first think possible. Les Sniques (“The Sneakies”) gives us a saucy comic mix of situational farce, physical comedy and verbal entendre all served up by some delightful characters and eventually coming to a literal climax, which we can all secretly enjoy in the comfort of our individual chairs in the dark.
And that’s the sign of a good sex farce.