London seeps with the juices of audacious Americana

London is full of Americans.

Walking through the streets of this city it has become unsurprising to hear Americans every few yards. Mostly they are high school and college students who have decided to come to England - the Mother Country - so they can be culturally submerged. At least we know the language, they think to themselves. But as Churchill allegedly said: "America and England are two countries divided by a common language."

This becomes apparent immediately. It seems as if every day, more teenagers flock to this side of the Atlantic, all to become "aware." The pub crawls, the theater, the history; there are a lot of us brutish student Yanks defiling the Mother.

Yank Alert #1: The streets around the theater district were choked last week. I was of course running late. At 7:15 I had just emerged from the Piccadilly Underground station for a performance that was to start at 7:30. One look at the streets and any thought of being in my seat before the curtain rose evaporated. People stood on every sidewalk, packed to the gills, mostly young ladies but many men as well.

All necks were craned with only a minority of people seeming to know what was being looked out for. What could this remarkable throng be about?

I pushed through the crowd, twisting this way and that, trying to at least find my bearings. That was even hard to do, the streets were so full. Up ahead was a glow from a cinema sign. This giant mass of people seemed to be throbbing towards the glow that loomed overhead from the sign.

Squeezing through to the intersection where the cinema's glowing sign acted as a beacon, the crowd got even worse. And throughout, all I heard was the murmuring and yammering of English voices. "He's over there?" someone excitedly muttered. A woman called out, "Oh God, I think he's over down there!" I ran into a tipsy fellow and finally got a chance to ask what all the commotion was about. "Hey mate, you don't know? It's Leonardo DiCaprio. His new movie's opening tonight."

Oh.

All hail America's greatest export.

Yank Alert #2: There is an event playing right now in London and New York that blew me away. The troupe is called De La Guardia and they are Argentinean. Harnessed to bungee chords, eight people fly over the audience's heads in the most astonishing display of ritualized, sexualized, electrified energy. All of this bungee sailing is choreographed to propulsive music played live. There are no seats and the show is performed in a warehouse setting.

It is a rave, a club, a disco and a cult all rolled into one. There are buckets of water, steam, balloons and scantily clad performers all thrashing about the theater. It continues like this for 75 minutes. Amazingly, throughout this spectacle the audience managed to stay almost totally sedate. They stood, looking upwards towards the performers, courteously enjoying.

In New York, I hear the audiences are crazy. This was far from it. The women in the cast, soaking wet, stroll through the audience dancing. None of the English audience budged. Pounding drums and no one went crazy. I of course took this burden upon myself.

So when this six-foot brunette bumped into me and started dancing I couldn't help but dance right back. The people around me found this very funny. There was the beautiful Argentinean bungee-chord-flying woman who was dancing with me! She winked and danced away, staying just long enough for me to feel foolish and self-conscious. And what's the first thing I hear after I elatedly regain my breath, after I have seized the day and dance with a gorgeous flying Argentine? A mother turns to her daughter to proclaim: "Oh, he's so American."

Yank Alert #3: Neil LaBute is the writer responsible for the liberatingly reprehensibly films In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors. His films are angry, often times blisteringly funny, chilling. Both warrant taking cold showers after they have been viewed.

The Almeida Theatre Company in London is known for its solid stagings of both classics and new works. They were responsible for last season's Iceman Cometh with Kevin Spacey that successfully transferred to Broadway. Currently, the Almeida is staging three one-act plays by Labute with the collective title Bash.

Like his films, LaBute's Bash probes the evil and menace that take hold of seemingly everyday people. All three actors in the production were American. Zeljko Ivanek, a fine actor who is notable for his work on Homicide: Life on the Street; Mary McCormack, who recently starred on Broadway in Cabaret; and a young pretty-boy named Matthew Lillard. Lillard was in Scream and Hackers.

The girls in the audience knew it-there were a lot of American college students. After the performance, Lillard left the theatre by the main entrance prompting all of the groupies to come up and fawn over him. He answered them all in an extremely thick California surf-boy accent.

I was pining for the more refined Leo, but I couldn't help but join the fray. A guy came up and said to him, "Wow. I really thought you were great in Hackers." To which Lillard responded with "Yo bro! Like, I think you got to rent some movies bro. I've done a lot more than that. How old were you when Hackers came out, anyway? Four?" All hail America's greatest export.