Some of you may recall a massive line of students waiting along the staircase of the SCC this past Friday night, Oct. 16—or you were standing in it. That line was the eager audience waiting to get into Boris’ Kitchen’s free annual Old Shit Show, featuring 14 sketches that had all been previously written and performed over the past 28 years.. The show highlights the troupe’s three new members: Ben Astrachan ’19, Mira Garin ’19 and Yael Matlow ’18.
The night began at 7:30 p.m. when the doors of the SCC Multipurpose Room were flung open, and the train of people filed inside, passing by a table set up just outside the doors where there was a fundraiser to raise money for the American Cancer Society. People had the option of placing money into containers displaying the names of four of Boris’ Kitchen cast members: Dennis Gonzales ’16, Sarah Duffet ’17, Paul Sindberg ’18 and Ben Astrachan ’19. The cast member who raised the most money earned a face full of pie.
As people settled down—the majority seated on the ground, some standing in the back, and even more still huddled by the entrance attempting to worm their way in through the crowd—the room buzzed with excited chatter. Soon, the lights went down and the first sketch, “Epic Wake-up Time,” commenced. The scene opened with a girl, Garin, sleeping on a bed, and an alarm clock, played by Yael Platt ’17, kneeling beside her. After a conspicuously long period of time where the audience waited in anticipatory silence, the alarm clock began to blare, though it was swiftly silenced when Garin slapped it on the head. However, the clock became increasingly persistent until the girl finally leapt from her bed to challenge her clock. The two characters then entered a truly epic wake up battle featuring a fight scene, an intense chess game, a dramatic, slow-motion race through the audience concluding with a game of tug-of-war that included the entire BK cast. In the end, the girl realized she was late to class and decided to go back to sleep.
The following sketches continued to match, and in some cases, surpass the level of absurdity set by the first ones. Two sketches were about Brandeis, “Pregnancy Test” and “Bizarro Theater.” “Pregnancy Test,” which garnered many laughs and took place at the Health Center, where an oddly enthusiastic nurse (Platt, asked each patient—a girl with a harsh cough (Yaznil Baez ’16), a girl with a broken ankle (Garin) and a guy (Zephry Wright ’17), if they were pregnant. Naturally, each patient was not pregnant … save for the last patient, played by Sarah Duffet, who, much to the nurse’s excitement, thought she might actually be pregnant. The sketch ended with a loud cough followed by a small, red fetus (a doll) hurled over the curtain from backstage.
The other 12 sketches varied drastically. “Spay Your Way to Coolness,” featuring Rodrigo Alfaro Garcia Granadas ’18, Sindberg, and Gonzalez, was about two popular high school boys trying to convince a third boy,Gonzalez, that the secret to their coolness was castration.
“Bee Juice” was an infomercial-style sketch where Astrachan and Granadas promoted their new product, Bee Juice, and included a passionate keyboard solo played on a smartphone to boost sales. Other performances took a jab at slightly political subject matter, such as “Knock Knock,” where a guy tried to teach his foreign friend American humor, “Racial Slur,” where a family enjoying a dinner party becomes flustered after one member of the group keeps using what sounds like racial slurs and “Allergic,” a sketch where a girl reveals that she is allergic to freedom.
The show’s final sketch was “WWJD” which featured the four senior members of BK, Deesha Patel ’16, Jason Kasman ’16, Gonzalez and Baez. The four seniors acted as middle-school girls at a slumber party playing Truth or Dare. When Baez was asked about her deepest secret, she responded that it was neglecting to say three “Hail Marys” after confession. However, the ironic humor ensued when her secret failed to impress her friends and they demanded she tell a better one, to which she revealed having a meth lab in her basement…which also failed to impress, since, according to the group, all the seventh-grade girls had one. After the final sketch, Duffet was revealed to have raised the most money (BK raised over $130 total) and thus received a pie to the face.
Kasman directed this year’s Old Shit Show, with help from Andrew Agress ’17 who assistant directed, Raphael Stigliano ’18 as producer and Subhi Sapkota ’16 on lights and sound.
