Tour Review: 'Shucked'
It will win you over or wear you down.
Shucked, now running at D.C.’s National Theatre, the latest stop of the North American Tour, is the story of simple folk in a small town who panic when their entire livelihood, the town’s supply of corn (it grows in ‘cornrows’) begins to shrivel up. It butters its bread with old wives’ tales and dad jokes. (I suppose I could say butters its corn, but I’m not falling for this trap.) It’s riddled with one-liners about marriage and drunk driving and grandma’s teeth and old pickup trucks and grandma’s ashes and orgasms and pooping squirrels. A lot of them feel like rejected Jeff Foxworthy or Larry the Cable Guy jokes.
When the quip, ‘As the personal trainer said to their lazy client, this isn’t working out,’ mustered up only a handful of laughs, I groaned because, well, I agreed. How was this show, one so clearly designed as a laugh-a-minute, howdy-doody cornucopia (oops!), just failing to work on me at all?
Then it won me over.
Or maybe it wore me down?