Enlarge imageBy Christine Kearney
NEW YORK (Reuters) - In a small downtown Manhattan theatre far removed from the formalities of Broadway, director Jamie Hook is searching for the next Keanu Reeves for the night’s performance.
The laughing audience filled with beer-swilling young men, uncommon among the slick revivals and more formal productions on Broadway, vies loudly for a chance to mimic Reeves’ role of an FBI detective who learns to surf in the spoof play "Point Break Live."
Every night a different Reeves hopeful is chosen and cued his lines surrounded by real actors and led through car chase, surfing and skydiving scenes, while the cast uses homoerotic sequences to send up the plot about a close-knit group of surfers who rob banks.
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"It shows that, literally, anyone can be plucked from their lounge room to play Keanu’s part," said audience member Kate McClure, 31. "It’s particularly hilarious when you see the blank look on the guy’s face who is waiting to be cued his line, and then realise it is just like Keanu’s."
This stage adaptation of the 1991 film "Point Break," has recently been extended in its off-Broadway run after sold-out shows.
Backstage after the show, Ray Truhn, 28, who landed the main part one recent night, said he had seen the film "probably around 50 times," explaining why he showed up.
"I heard that they picked a Keanu out of the audience every night and I figured, well, I could do that," he said after changing out of the undersized unzipped wetsuit he spent much of the show wearing.
Besides the chance to imitate Reeves, he jumped at the chance to play a "cool badass FBI agent type guy."
"People say I give the best Keanu impression they have ever heard," he said. "He has that deer in the headlights look about his acting."
Several representatives for Reeves did not return calls seeking comment on the production.
Director Jamie Hook, said the show originated in Seattle, 2004, when co-creator Jaime Keeling challenged him to a bet to do action theatre.
"It’s a play that responds to this real lack in theatre which is that action belongs on stage, not just on film," he said.
The audience, who is subjected to fake gun shots and squirts of water, is "more willing to experience something" than a typical Broadway audience, he said.
After Seattle the show also toured to Vancouver and Minneapolis, with plans to possibly take it Iceland, said Hook. But if it ever tours to Los Angeles, where the film was set, would the real Keanu ever make a guest appearance?
"We have asked him to come and be in the show," said Hook, adding that contrary to how it may appear, the production pays tribute to Reeves, 42, best known for the Matrix science-fiction films.
"A lot of people think we are teasing Keanu Reeves," he said. "But I think he is the most generous actor of his generation.
"He never does something where the common man doesn’t think, ’I could do that!’"
