born to be wild

Arizona Daily Wildcat photo by Destaine McAllister The Wylde Men in a Renaissance threesome.

Toad, Seth and Dr. Cranius, the infamous "Wylde Men" of the Festival, play at returning to man's primitive state in a setting not unlike the muddy Mesopotamian crescent.

"It's based on an archetype of the mad scientist," says Cranius, the Dr. Frankenstein of the trio. Seth responds that he's the Igor type. "We're scholars searching for answers in the mud," he says.

The Wylde Men (Old English for "wild men") have the only show at the Festival that requires mud as a prop. In the show, Seth and Dr. Cranius (played by Douglas Mumaw and Jonathan Crocker) travel 5000 years back in time and find themselves in the mythical Mudhenge. Moved by their more beastly urges and Toad's savage drumming, it seems necessary to have a mud fight.

Douglass says that being primitive in this way is like being a child again. Along those lines he tries to turn the dramaturgic word "play" into an action verb again. "How often do you get to see grown men wearing goofy hats and playing in mud?"

But the Wylde Men are about more than childish games. "Just like Shakespeare looked back at Egypt to write about Cleopatra," Jonathan says, his beard still dripping with muddy water, "we go back even further."

Their inspiration is a mixture of the Epic of Gilgamesh and Fort Apache. "Gilgamesh, if you recall, had a fight with a savage named Enkidu," Jonathan says. "After battling it out for, like, seven days, they decided to be friends in a John Wayne kind of moment."

Douglass and Jonathan, who study being wild men in their spare time, feel that the actual clash between modern culture and the wild man has its problems. "The wild man is an endangered species," Dr. Cranius says. He often wanders through unpopulated terrain looking for the sort of silence Thoreau found at Walden Pond, where "everything is unusual." But in society the wild man is the unusual one.

The Noble Savage, Chewbacca and John Candy may be oddities of the past, but you can still catch Toad, Seth and Dr. Cranius, contemporary Wylde Men, at the Renaissance Festival through March.