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Mimes, masks and madness

IMAGO’s Frogz brings its unusual antics to Shryock Auditorium Friday

Factoid:IMAGO will perform its token show, Frogz, at 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 28 at Shryock Auditorium. Tickets are $18, or $12 for children 15 an under. For more information or to purchase tickets, call 453-2787.

This is a show with acrobatic frogs.

What more could you want in terms of entertainment?

Perhaps some human-sized Slinkys and mimes. A paper bag with an inner life of its own and a cowboy with a movie for a face.

It’s an eclectic mix, but apparently it’s a formula that’s worked for the theater troupe IMAGO – for 24 years now.

“It’s vaudeville,” says Jerry Mouawad, who co-created the show Frogz with theater veteran Carol Triffle in 1979. “Comedy, especially physical comedy, is reawakening. It reawakens our bodies to a giggly, uplifting sensation.”

The SIUC campus will have the opportunity to experience that sensation live when IMAGO brings its centerpiece of performance, Frogz, to Shryock Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 28. Having appeared on numerous television specials and at live venues in all 50 states and three continents, Frogz has received wide acclaim from critics all across the country and continues to amuse with its unique mix of entertainment.

Mouawad and Triffle first developed the show in an effort to combine both the visual and performing arts – a formula that has evolved into a hodgepodge of different entertainment acts, from the acrobatic amphibians to the “larvabatic” to “orbs.”

The larvabatic, which press materials said is Mouawad’s and Triffle’s most skillful creation, creates the illusion of a worm performing various acrobatic feats. Designed to integrate the human form with a mask worn on the mid-section, the resulting creature squirms and moves in an acrobatic, if not quite human manner.

The orbs are a pet project of Triffle, who envisioned the idea of giant billiard balls taking to the stage for performance. Resulting as “a giant mask,” as Triffle describes it in press materials, the orb allows the actor inside access to a broad range of emotions.

“Both the actor and the mask metamorphose into something new,” Triffle said. “That is, the actor and the mask have both entered a new world, a pretend-yet-real-other world.”

And, in the end, that surreal and humorous variation on the everyday world is what creators say has helped propel Frogz to the success it has experienced during the past quarter of a century. With masks, acrobatics, mimes and creatures you won’t find in any books, Frogz is a show that can appeal to people of all ages.

Reporter Geoffrey Ritter can be reached at gritter@dailyegyptian.com