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An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein

    Ah, to be able once or twice or thrice a day to slip into the mindset of Shel Silverstein! To see with his clarity and wit how absurd the ordinary world is or could be with just a tiny click of the dial off center; what joy, even if a disconcerting, discombobulating sort of joy it might be.  Failing that, next best would be to spend An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein at the Atlantic Theatre. The "adult" in the evening's title is there to distinguish between this material and Silverstein's classic books for young readers, such as The Giving Tree and Where The Sidewalk Ends.
    The evening is made up of ten delectable helpings of Silverstein, most of them more in the mode of sketches than one-act plays. Most set the mind to buzzing with new ways of seeing and understanding, and most are hilarious even while being sometimes painful.
    A well dressed yuppie woman is in full denial about having taken the first step to becoming a bag lady, even though in her designer handbag is a bowl of oatmeal sticky-fingered off a diner table and dumped into the bag, bowl and all. Two young strangers, male and female, duel to exhaustion by hurling back and forth what seems to be every single euphemism for breasts and penis. The best daddy in the world has given his little girl a pony for her birthday but--surprise!--he shot it because it bit him.
    Silverstein creates a marvelous extended scene of physical and verbal slapstick in which he clearly shows that all words except "meat" and "potatoes" are extraneous. The one guy who created all the cliches of the past thirty or so years, as well as that ubiquitous happy face tries to explain all the damage he has done.
    The evening is a delight, packed with laughs; even at the moments of bitterest satire Silverstein's impish grin presides, bringing gentle light to the moment. Unfortunately, the last two sketches-one about two street hookers offering a special two-for-one bargain, and another about a blind blues singer with a talking dog-are overlong and not as good as the others, so that the evening winds down rather than ratchets up to a fully satisfying climax. But even when Silverstein is not at his best he's still amusing.
    The cast, made up of Alicia Goranson, Jordan Lage, Jody Lambert, Kelly Maurer, Josh Stamberg, and Maryann Urbano, is uniformly excellent, zipping into and out of costumes, wigs, and characters with glee and gusto. They look like they're having one heck of a good time. Karen Kohlhaas's direction keeps it all moving along with dash and high spirits. Walt Spangler's slick plastic set is colorful and versatile, Miguel Angel Huidor's costumes capture the mood of this slightly off-kilter world, and Robert Perry's lighting illuminates that world perfectly.