Haus of Ruckus' “'Jacques'alope,” August 25 and 26

Friday, August 25, and Saturday, August 26, 7:34 p.m.

The Black Box Theatre, 1623 Fifth Avenue, Moline IL

Fans of T Green, Calvin Vo, and their uniquely riotous theatre and comedy troupe Haus of Ruckus are invited to see where it all began, and where it's going next, when the Black Box Theatre hosts a two-night reprise of HoR's stage debut “Jacques”alope on August 25 and 26, offering a one-hour version of this hysterical 2021 work that heads to the Elgin Fringe Festival next month.

To be sure, those who aren't yet Haus of Ruckus devotees are also encouraged to attend – and it's likely that after 60 minutes in the company of Green, Vo, and their present and future co-stars, instant fandom will be the natural result. Delivering clever, strange, hilarious, thoughtfully silly slapsticks rife with pop-culture references, musical interludes, trashings of the fourth wall, and the ever-essential puppets, Haus of Ruckus has charmed crowds at Davenport's Mockingbird on Main and St. Ambrose University, as well as Moline's Black Box, for nearly two years. Their titles have included the 2022 three-fer of “Pants” Labyrinth, Random Access Morons, and Spooky Pete, with Are We There Yeti? staged this past spring and June's Funkyology – originally intended for a Mockingbird on Main run just before the tragic collapse of the venue's Davenport building on Fourth Street – a Black Box fundraiser in June that raised more than $1,000 for victims of the collapse.

Yet everything started with the November, 2021 debut of “Jacques”alope, the first (and definitely not last) Haus of Ruckus entertainment to feature Vo and Green, respectively, as slacker best buds Johnny and Fungus, whose stage exploits have found them embarking on increasingly insane adventures. To suggest how insane, “Jacques”alope, the most essentially straightforward of the bunch, features Johnny and Fungus on a desert road trip toward Burning Man, and has them encountering, among other figures, blackmailing mom-and-pop-shop proprietors named Mom and Pop Shop, a cactus who sings, and the titular jack rabbit with antelope horns. Who also speaks French. Because of course he does.

Calling the comedy “decidedly professional” and “innovative stuff,” Reader theatre reviewer Pamela Briggs added “This show had me laughing aloud” – and at the performance we attended together, she and I absolutely weren't alone in our audible delight. It consequently made sense for Green and Vo to resurrect “Jacques”alope for this year's arts showcase the Elgin Fringe Festival (September 1 through 10 in downtown Elgin, Illinois), an idea the Haus of Ruckus founders say had been gestating for a while.

“We've been talking about doing a fringe festival for a long time,” says Green. “Since 'Jacques' wrapped up in November almost two years ago, in fact. But because that was 2021, not a lot of the festivals were open again, or they were tentative about reopening. I don't know if you'd heard that there was this pandemic? That made things difficult.”

“After 'Jacques,'” adds Vo,” a lot of people were like, 'Oh, other people need to see this – you should get this out there somewhere!' They had a lot of ideas about us bringing Haus of Ruckus other places, and I was like, 'That would be a great idea if it was a thing we could actually do in real life.' But we looked at a lot of people that we draw inspiration from as comedians and writers, and we found that a lot of what works in other models is sort of finding your audience – bringing your art to places where many people can see it, and many different kinds of people can see it. And the Fringe seemed possible. We thought that we had something that was a little bit different, and Fringe is a great place to put om something that's a little bit different.”

Regarding the decision to re-create their first production for the Fringe, Vo says, “It was always the choice because it has a nice concise story where all the parts work together in some way. And the Fringe Festival has a one-hour time limit. So we looked at all our scripts and asked: Which one do we know the best, and that is the most mobile – or sort of tour-able – script? The script that we can sort of slice down well into an hour and feel like we're still telling the entire story?”

As an introduction to the characters of Johnny and Fungus, “Jacques”alope also seemed like a fitting introduction to the world of Haus of Ruckus.

“'Jacques' was very much written as our buddy comedy,” says Green. “I think it's the one Johnny-and-Fungus play where Johnny and Fungus have to be in it. Because when you look back at the later Johnny-and-Fungus plays, you sort of realize, 'Oh, we could cut 'em out and there'd still be a whole show there.'”

The process of editing the original “Jacques”alope, with its 90-minute running length, down to a Fringe-required hour was accomplished, says Vo, by “basically making sure that the central story itself remained intact regardless of what we cut. So we looked at the jokes and the bits. There are some jokes and bits that are in there because we find them amusing. There are jokes and bits in there where we're sort of experimenting with different ideas – like, seeing how we can comically interact with the audience. And then there are sections of duo-standup that sort of punctuate the story.

“So we sort of kept the stuff that was really necessary,” he continues, “and trimmed off stuff that was maybe still good, but stuff that we thought we could lose and still make the story understandable. A lot of that stuff is still in the show. It's just not as, I don't know .. . Indulgent?”

“There are a couple of really drawn-out bits that were very funny and we liked them,” adds Green. “But like Calvin says, they in no way affected the plot. I mean, we're very breezy in that one. Like, Johnny and Fungus might just stop being 'characters in a play' for five minutes and just talk about something else. So we had to take some of those away. The journey definitely goes a lot quicker now. But sometimes I'm like, 'Oh, I did enjoy that scene where Johnny and Fungus are almost anti-protagonists.'”

From the sound of it, the process of cutting and re-shaping the script was more difficult than the process of applying for Elgin Fringe Festival inclusion … though the process of waiting on “Jacques”alope's festival acceptance, for Green at least, may have been toughest of all.

“We basically had to fill out a Google form,” says Green. “'How many people are in the cast?' 'Give us a synopsis.' That sort of thing. I think there was an option to provide pictures just to get a sense of the overall vibe. But a lot of the submission was, I think, just sot of making sure that we weren't a bunch of weird freaks. You know, that we went to Juilliard, did some Broadway … .”

On the day of the springtime announcement of the festival lineup, Green says he was actually at the Black Box, preparing to make his entrance for the venue's March production of The Mystery of Irma Vep.

“I was backstage about to go on, and they had this whole Facebook Live stream where they were announcing all the people that were included. It was like 7:29 and the show started at 7:30, and then we were one of the last names announced. I think there were 30 performance slots and 50 artist slots, and I remember squinting really hard at the white board to look at all the names on it. There were quite a few applicants, so we were lucky.”

“It's weird,” says Vo, “because we knew it was a shot in the dark. We had looked at bringing 'Jacques' to other theatres, other cities, and the festival was sort of like one of many options in terms of getting Jacques out and about – and getting Haus of Ruckus out and about. But we applied, and we got in, and we weren't necessarily expecting to get it.” For Vo's part, though, he has no memory of the actual lineup announcement, given that he didn't see or hear it. “I don't know what I was doing that night,” he says. “Isn't that terrible?”

With Vo and Green again assuming their Johnny-and-Fungus alter egos alongside returning “Jacques”alope cast members Sarah Goodall, Max Robnett, Isaac Smith, David Weaver, and T's father (and frequent Haus of Ruckus cameo player) Terry Green Sr., Vo's composer/instrumentalist cousin Riley Carizey again serves as the show's one-man band, and yes – all the puppets are returning. (“It's funny you ask that,” says Vo after I make the inquiry during our phone interview, “because I'm holding them right now. We're getting ready for rehearsal tonight.”) The only new castmate is Keenen Wilson, a subsequent Haus of Ruckus favorite who assumes the singing-cactus role initially embodied by the currently-in-NYC Joseph Lasher.

Says Green, “One cool thing about Haus of Ruckus two years later is that we've been able to work with so many people in our plays, and it's nice to bring along Keenen, one of our new recurring members, and introduce him to Elgin along with everyone else. And these people have jobs, and a couple of them are just starting school and were willing to take some time away from that right at the beginning of the semester … .

“It's so exciting to be doing this,” says Green. “I mean, hey! We've got a whole bunch of great people here!”

Haus of Ruckus' “Jacques”alope will be performed at Moline's Black Box Theatre on August 25 and 26 at the company's traditional start time of 7:34 p.m., and tickets are $10 at the door. “Jacques”alope will also be staged at the Elgin Fringe Festival (in the Side Street Video Arts venue) on Thursday, September 7, at 9 p.m. For more information, visit Haus of Ruckus at their Facebook page, the Black Box Theatre Web site, and the Elgin Fringe Festival Web site.