George Orange and Jo Fong in The Rest of Our Lives at Under the Radar Festival. Photo: Craig Kirkwood

The line between sincerity and twee, between childlike wonder and cloying whimsy, can get very blurry, especially once clowns are involved. But The Rest of Our Lives, presented at La MaMa as part of Under the Radar, lands on the right side almost all the time. It’s relentlessly unfussy and keeps things simple–two people, a couple of chairs, a soundtrack, a digital signboard, and a handful of props you could find in any toy store. And it’s insistently grounded in the material world: You feel the weight of its bodies, the effort it takes them to move, their sweat. The music gets too loud sometimes. You may end up holding a prop, or a performer–sweat and all–might sit down next to you. What seems at first to be light observational standup then turns into a dance piece that’s almost Butoh-esque in its slow weightiness, moves through light contortionism, and winds up with a full-hearted invitation to the audience to embrace the spirit of the piece, its games and its dancing, alongside the performers. The Rest of Our Lives may tackle big questions, but it wears its metaphors lightly and its heart on its sleeve. 

If you think this all sounds a little bit like the work of Talking Band, whose Existentialism played at La MaMa a couple of years ago, you’d be right–the joy, the thoughtfulness, and the hope seem from a similar well, though this is the scrappy touring version.

Fong and Orange currently reside and make their work in Wales (though Orange is American originally). In their fifties (Orange is 58, Jo says, and Fong presumably around the same), they’ve got 100+ years of experience between them, per the program: Orange as a clown and Fong as a dancer. But what comes now, with the world on fire and aging bodies to contend with? It’s the rest of our lives we’re grappling with, after all. Fong and Orange’s answer is transcendently simple: Ask the big questions (questions, scene titles–“Age Against the Machine,” for example, which, yes, is scored to Rage Against the Machine– and simple instructions to performers and audience, like “take a pause,” light up in red on a digital ticker tape upstage). Move with conviction in response, with a score of familiar tunes. (If I have one quibble with the piece, I’d love more surprises in the musical choices–they are varied, but all very familiar.) Keep working it out. 

The sequences that transcend the simple pleasure of what’s happening in the room are the ones that seem to work as both metaphor and action: The carrying of the burdens of life and aging, figured as a process of actual weight-lifting: the lifting and hefting of each other’s bodies. “Getting through it” as a clever bit of contortionism, as the two compete for the most unusual way to pass their body through the legs of a cube-base chair.

So much of a dancer’s effort often goes into the illusion of effortlessness, but the opposite is true here: We are meant to see how hard it is to force one’s body through space. Fong and Orange lift each other, straining to drag their respective weights across the space. They get out of breath. They drip sweat. They change clothes in front of us, revealing ordinarily imperfect bodies. Fong sings karaoke, with more enthusiasm than pitch. And I think it’s their warts-and-all gameness that allows the audience to embrace them back at the end. Even when staring down their own mortality, Fong and Orange bring a contagious enthusiasm that was delightful to see. It’s the beginning of the end, as the show’s website reminds us. But we’re still here.