The students of the Brookdale Community College Theater Club bring the irreverent black comedy DOG SEES GOD to the stage of BCC’s Performing Arts Center, this Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Looking back on it, Charles M. Schulz must have had some pretty well thought-out reasons not to have ever aged his classic Peanuts characters out of their frozen-in-time childhood moment — and with Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, the audience can see for themselves how the neuroses, personality quirks and phobias of Charlie Brown and his friends might have gotten the better of them in young adulthood.
Something of an antidote to You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, the rarely revived play by Bert V. Royal makes itself visible for three free performances at Brookdale Community College, September 11 through 13. A presentation of the school’s Theater Club, the 2004 “unauthorized parody” goes up at BCC’s Performing Arts Center on the Lincroft campus.
Originally staged at NYC’s Fringe Festival, Dog Sees God follows the character “CB” after the death of his beloved dog — a period of soul-searching during which the teenager comes to the realization that he’s attracted to his piano-playing friend “Beethoven.” Of little solace are his gone-Goth younger sister, his druggy friend “Van” and a germophobic, insecure bully who may or may not have been quite the Pig-Pen at some point. It’s a setting in which “drug use, suicide, eating disorders, teen violence, rebellion and sexual identity collide and careen toward an ending that’s both haunting and hopeful” and it’s on stage from 7 pm, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
