Shepherdstown, West Virginia—The Contemporary American Theater Festival is taking a chance this year by presenting its very first musical, Max Baker’s Eelwax Jesus 3-D Pop Music Show. More a revue than a play, the show satirizes the vapidity of an American scene that seems to regard reality TV as something that ultimately supplants reality itself.

With music by Lee Sellars, who acts and fronts for his onstage band in this production, Eelwax doesn’t have a plot in a conventional sense. Rather, a bit like reality TV itself, the show unfolds seemingly at random, taking place in a vaguely unsettling America of the future circa 2015. The title of the play, BTW, is derived from the actual name of the real-life band for which Baker and Sellars compose their songs.

Oh yes, the plot. It seems that folks have taken to huddling together and hiding inside a modern version of the boarding house—small, interior communes where random, unaffiliated people, not families, rarely venture outside due to a rampaging plague of a swine flue variant.

We meet three of these inscape dwellers, Meredith (Clare Schmidt), James (Jonathan Raviv), and Mrs. Worthington (Helen-Jean Arthur), each of whom lives in his or her own little world, united only by their passion for watching the Eelwax Jesus 3-D Pop Music Show, presumably on TV. I say presumably because the show, introduced by the obnoxious host, Mr. Shine (Kurt Zischke) seems to take place live in their living room.

Led by Ignatz McGillicuddy (Lee Sellars), the band (including members Michael Pemberton, Joe Rosenfeld, and Danny Tate as themselves) punches out pop, alternative, and vaguely post-punk songs and lyrics encompassing what poet Archibald MacLeish might one have called “the pall of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.” All of which seems to affirm the residents’ collective sense of being and nothingness.

All the while, stage right, a largely silent 1950s housewife, Esme (Margot White) irons an endless array of table napkins à la Ionesco in what appears to be a framing gesture of perpetual futility. And stage left, we occasionally glimpse the excursions of a seemingly aimless bum, (Ernie S Smith), and a “man in a gas mask” (James Rana), both of whom occasionally interrupt the residents’ TV tranquility. Other minor characters also float in and out, as if in a dream, and background images, along with real and fake advertisements project onto the stage at random intervals and during the TV show’s periodic commercial breaks.

The show’s largely (and intentionally) pointless dialogue, its critical, beaten down song lyrics, and its overall sense of endless and pointless repetition (verbal minimalism?) against the backdrop of a species-threatening plague create the sense that it’s all over for the characters, for us, and for life in general. The approach is irreverent, but it places both the characters and the audience in a post-post-post whatever universe, a Thomas Pynchon-esque entropy-zone that questions the very existence, let alone the usefulness of our universe as it's currently configured.

The actors seem to be one with this vision. They do an impressive job projecting the lives of characters whose lives are without much meaning save that derived from their favorite TV show. It seems to provide some kind of religious, quasi-sacramental answers for their empty existence. Yet we never really get to know any of them. Maybe that’s the point. Ah, what’s the meaning of it all? Frankly, no one knows. But why get down about it?

I’m not sure why every successive modern generation of intellectuals sees the world as some flavor of Sartre’s existential angst. Is that the “progress” in “progressive?” Levity aside, the persistence of this attitude is not very hopeful, nor is it very constructive. It’s as if at least one major quadrant of the artistic universe keeps offering, as non-answers, various riffs on No Exit throughout the decades, moving forward like a Great Chain of Being from the Beats, the hippies, and the punksters, to the still-with-us Goths, and maybe even to our current pre-occupation with conflicted and cerebral vampires.

Fortunately, Eelwax delivers its mournful, nihilistic philosophy in ironic and often amusing doses of self deprecating humor and absurdist non-sequiturs, lightening the show’s mood somewhat. One amusing bit involves Mrs. Worthington’s fake pet dog, whose presence, if not its name, is a running joke throughout the evening.

On the whole, the show is actually pretty good-natured, in spite of all the negativity embodied in its parallel universe. But it’s hard to know what to make of it all. Are things really that bad today (aside from the fact that no one can find a job)? America used to be a can-do kind of place. Whatever happened to constructive solutions?

Eelwax Jesus, the show, is a dilemma without a solution, a theory without a proof. Okay, the satire on faux reality (reality TV) vs. reality itself is there, as are wry comments on modern phenomena like gated communities and the profound ignorance of the “better” and more “intellectual” classes who profess to know it all while knowing nothing. But what, in the end, is the point?

Maybe the point is, there is no point. But if so, haven’t we been there and done that before?

Eelwax Jesus is an interesting concept, but it should probably serve some time in rewrite before it re-emerges for another try. Its characters need to be more compelling, and the show’s message could use a bit of clarification to get it running on a more coherent track.

Author Max Baker no doubt knows what he what his show means. Since he also directed it, the actors know what it means as well. But it would be good if they’d share their secret. Maybe they could with a bit more dramatic sharpening by the author. But if the secret has gestated in the ancient gene pool of Sartre and Ionesco, it might be better to try something completely different.

Rating: ** (Two stars.)

At the Festival:

Running through August 1, CATF will be rotating in repertory the following dramatic offerings:

• The Eelwax Jesus 3-D Pop Music Show, a world premiere by Max Baker and Lee Sellers. The first musical at CATF at least since we’ve been reviewing the festival for the Washington Times (circa Y2K), this show promises “toe-tapping” pop songs and a satirical look into our current theater-of-the-absurd era.
• Lidless, a first production by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig. A look into Guantanamo Bay through the eyes of both the interrogator and the interrogated. Will the U.S. be the bad guy again? Stay tuned.
• Inana by Michele Lowe. An unusual treatment of a compelling behind-the-scenes story from the Second Iraq War interweaving heroic attempts to save priceless artworks with an unexpected love story.
• Breadcrumbs, a world premiere by Jennifer Haley.  An elderly writer grapples with early-stage Alzheimer’s as she attempts to write what will probably be her last work of fiction—or not.
• White People by J.T. Rogers. Three plays within a play dealing with the third-rail topic of our times—the Decline and Fall of white America.

Tickets: Prices begin at $25 per seat depending on package purchase. For single and group ticket sales, call 304-876-3304, or see below.

Information, including directions to Shepherdstown, WV: Visit www.catf.org or call 304-876-3473 or 800-999-CATF (2283).

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