Review- The Heart of a Dog

Okay, four guys and a dog walk into a bar….Wait, no. Five guys walk into a bar….Um, no. Actually two guys walk into a bar.
In The Heart of a Dog, the math isn’t easy. But it isn’t entirely the point either. In Bad Soviet Habits’ adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical novel, two guys play five characters, one of which moves fluidly between man-ness and dog-ness.
Written in Stalinist Russia, Bulgakov’s novel is—among other things—a satire about the limits of science and the knack for certain life forms to have a mind of their own. A comic Frankenstein story, its experimental subject (a dog who is implanted with human glands and testicles) has a flowering of intelligence, but his instincts and impulses remain rather, well, animal.
Andy North and Kurt Hartwig take on all of the roles, including the dog, tossing characters back and forth like the tennis ball that continues to fascinate Sharkey, the dog, long after he has learned to speak. In fact, the roles are interchangeable—the pair don’t decide which “track” to take until an audience member tells them.
This is no-frills theater. Or at least it’s without the frills that patrons of $125-a-ticket Broadway musicals are used to. Instead, Hartwig and North rely on imagination and wit, not to mention expert pacing and full throttle energy, to tell their story. Performed for the price of a beer (and a “contribution” bucket at the door), it’s the kind of theater that should be more common around these parts.
There’s one more local performance, Friday night, before the pair takes the show to the Prague Fringe Festival and Minnesota Fringe Festival.