THE SILLY WILLIAM GAMBIT is a triumph of strangeness.
Written and starring Matt Badder, THE SILLY WILLIAM GAMBIT is a high octane surrealist fantasy that finally makes
me give a shit about chess. Running over the course of seven consecutive chess games on the train to hell (Philadelphia), Silly Willam (Bader) must face off against the devil adjacent Bum Fiddler (Bader) in a game to decide the fate of his immortal soul. It’s Monty Python’s The Seventh Seal, and I’m loving every second of it.
Aided by Justin Jager’s frantic direction, Bader scrambles across the stage to embody a whole gambit of silly yet provocative characters. Both William and Fiddler are deeply engrossing, and Badder hopping, sometimes literally, from role to role is both incredibly silly and very effective.
As the train ride jostles along and we are pulled deeper and deeper Badar’s best of seven, the extended drama of Silly William and his school days at (and this is a mouth full here) St. Silly The Serious’s School for the Exceptionally gifted at Chess (Among other things) begins to unfold, and the real mystery behind the silliness starts to make itself known.
The genius of Bader’s writing is that while the play is about chess, someone with a negligible chess background such as myself can very easily understand everything happening on stage.
Chess is just a vehicle to tell a very silly story about passion, loss, friendship, and yes, even chess. Bader’s mock English accent and absurd mannerisms slowly begin to lull you into a camp comedy, but he never breaks form for the ever growing dramatic turns. Like any good chess master Bader and Jager are always 3 moves ahead of the audience, and the final moments of THE SILLY WILLIAM GAMBIT hit harder than a fluke checkmate you tripped right into.
When the dust settles and the endgame is behind us, we are left in a daze. Bader’s closing remarks, as Matt himself, not as William, or Fiddler, or Dinger, or wherever, breathe a sigh of
relief as the audience is allowed to come back full circle to reality. THE SILLY WILLIAM GAMBIT’s final move is a straight gut punch, tearing away all the silliness as the real tragedy
behind the scenes is exposed to the harsh light of day. The chess metaphors all click into place, and I am left with a hankering to go online and try my hand at some practice games against the low ELO bots.
The Independent Artists movement 