Poona the Fuckdog is KW Little Theatre’s latest

Poona the Fuckdog (And Other Plays for Children), playing at Kitchener-Waterloo Little Theater this weekend, is the kind of show that seems like it was written after ingesting a handful of sleeping pills with a four-pack of Red Bull.

It’s a rambling, borderline inane show where everything gets made fun of — from dying orphans to God itself — but what’s great about it is how it balances the quirkily weird stuff with uncomfortably weird passages and moments.

There’s a dark, twisted undercurrent to every upbeat character and scene, which keeps the show mesmerizing, even if it’s not always side-splittingly funny. It’s worth the ticket price if you are in the mood for a comedy in very bad taste, but it’s even more worth it if you’re looking for something wholly unique and mind-boggling in the best of ways.

I can’t even begin to tell you what Poona the Fuckdog is about. I could tell you the sequence of events, but my memory would be hazy from its sheer randomness and it wouldn’t make any sense anyway.

To spoil Poona the Fuckdog is to ruin the joy of discovering Poona the Fuckdog, so I won’t go deep into the details. I’ll just say that every member of the ensemble cast is a lot of fun and their constant child-like demeanours — hence the full title — do a lot to help the show be as delightfully alienating as it is.

Everything about them and the show is so broad and over-the-top that it’s difficult not to step back and realize you’re watching a human being dressed as a penis and singing a song about tequila while strumming an acoustic guitar. But I mean that as a compliment.

Playing this show with a straight face would be doing it a disservice because the whole show would be off-putting, so it’s important to make sure every surface element is as inviting as possible so that the disturbing layer underneath stays close enough to the surface to be noticed but not so close so as to take over the rest of the show.

Even if there are a few groaner jokes — Stephen Harper gets brought up — and some bits overstay their welcome — the “that” exchange could probably have been condensed by a fair bit — this is something that keeps your attention from minute one and never allows it to wander.

The idea of the “cracked fairy tale” is overdone today, but Poona the Fuckdog transcends that parodic sub-genre and becomes downright surreal. Not surreal enough to take itself seriously, but with the right amount of warped reality and humanity to make a joke about all of it.

If you are sensitive to art making light of heavy topics like slurs and terminal diseases, this is probably something you’ll want to avoid but for those with a craving to see something quite funny and nearly unfathomable then you’ll definitely want to check this out.

Just don’t be surprised when the world blows up in a nuclear holocaust. That’s when the intermission starts.