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Coming into the Ashby Stage for the Shotgun Lab production of Cry, Don’t Cry (running through this Thursday), the audience has to wonder: “What sort of show are we in for?” 

Or is it a show at all? Opposite the ascending pews of the auditorium is a memorial altar, heaped with items ranging from personal taste (a bottle of Lismore Scotch) to vaguely magical props (colored dice) to the whimsical or incongruent (a jar of pickles next to cat’s ears for a costume party), as well as exotic flowers in a vase and a candle burning. Is it really a service? A ritual reenactment? We’ve been asked to contribute origami testimonials to the altar. 

There’s a question of tone, anyway, as the five people onstage talk to the audience rather normally at first, if in slightly hushed, reverent voices, thanking them for coming. Indeed, it almost seems there’s a sixth up there with them—the dear mutual friend, departed, we’ve all gathered to celebrate. But who’s the absent friend? 

The doctor of the deceased introduces himself and the family, friends, neighbors standing around him, asking if anyone else wants to be recognized. There’s been music, percussion with a little flatback mandolin strumming, sort of a processional to the neotraditional Sephardic “O Senor” and then a song about the departed’s life and exploits, from a playground tune, “Don Gato.” 

This just about tears it, though in a soft way. More riotous stuff comes later, if intermittently. Is it a pet funeral? Nothing’s ever quite clear. At the “talk-back” after the show, so integral a part of Lab productions, one of the performers mentions that director Christine Young remembered the song, and that “you can hear it sung by middle school kids sometimes.”  

The troupe of professional and eccentric mourners is Bale Techlorico, which “blends traditional, folkloric performance with contemporary urban sensibilities.” Is a shaggy dog (or cat) story traditional or contemporary? What is particularly folkloric about all this, as “the service” proceeds through testimonial, song, dance (a wild fandango), sharing secrets, puppetry (staged on a shrouded figure recumbent on an upright piano) and audience participation? Is the approach to real humor rather than improv comedy? The “service” more-or-less follows the program (though “due to the volatility of emotions ... things may change at a moment’s notice”), developing into routines of grief and remembrance, as eccentric as the characters, if not quite grotesque or really very “dark.” 

Like much of what happens at Shotgun Lab, Cry, Don’t Cry is a work in progress. The various “scenes,” primal or otherwise, segue smoothly into each other, though the piece as a whole feels charged with the dynamics of improvisation, a too-familiar dynamic, which often flaccidly replaces form in shows ranging from sketch to physical theater. Unfortunately, the improv dynamic has become so familiar, it often stifles the spontaneity it was meant to foster. 

But the humor of characterization is what really underpins the show. The cast (Daveed Diggs as Dr. Suchnsuch; Janaki Ranpura as Don Gato’s daughter, Merry; Parker Leventer as the Don’s secret love, Elena Margerita; Nicole Lungerhausen as neighbor Madame Bienvenue, who hears voices; and Greg Beuthin as Mortimer, the hired musician who specializes in Bar Mitzvahs and gay weddings, and generally acts like a drummer) are all skilled performers, multi-tasking in this collective effort, a close-knit ensemble. They are what this kind of self-generating theater is really about. 

H