Chaser

****
Fringe

When the tag line below the title on the postcard is "Contains male nudity and scenes of a sexual nature" you know you're gonna have a sell out. If that's what made this the first sell out of the Fringe then FINE because this provocative, extremely current and relevant play kinda needs to be seen. Starting out innocently enough with two gay guys and a futon, their first date unfolds in real time and once the futon is folded out we enter some very controversial, thought provoking territory that Playwright Howard Walters has handled with a great deal of precision and honesty. Director Shaun Peknic has deftly guided the two excellent actors (Wil Petre and Jake Alexander) into a very real and natural performance which was no small task given the intensity and frankness of this play. This was a great start to my tour of the Fringe and I'll be thinking about Chaser for weeks.

Also blogged by: [Patrick]

FRINGE: Not From Canada

How existential can you get when you're busy covering a table with push-top soap dispensers? The answer, provided by Kevin Doyle's funny but overlong play Not from Canada, is "very." It's a commercially branded No Exit, a satire that stresses the banality of an identity-less society by sticking three amnesiacs in a room. Cute Guy, Cute Girl, and Not-So-Cute Girl are exactly that, and nothing more: their fate is to recount postmodern narratives in a clipped and incredulous tone as a French waiter exaggeratedly ignores them. With intentionally racist observations about our segregated culture, Doyle breaks the ice by having them all realize what they have in common: they are white and have clothes on from Malaysia (and so therefore must be friends). The show continues in this vein, looking at the concerns of affluent idiots who fear the abundance of choice, celebrate the necessity of useless sales, and get lost in the corporate machine: "Is it a Target-Taco Bell or a Taco-Target Bell?

[Read on]

...Double Vision

photo: Jim Baldassare

An uneasy mix of farcical comedy and cynical relationship drama, this Fringe Festival one-act works best when its characters are in full-on comic neurotic mode; it falters when it tries to go deeper than a sitcom. The story involves a half dozen single New Yorkers (three men who share an apartment, and three women who are involved with them in one way or another) but it noticeably lacks big city flavor - it's no more urban than an episode of Friends. One guy can't muster up the courage to tell his girlfriend to stay with him rather than take that new job out in California, another only hooks up with married women, another breaks away from the throes of a passion with a French girl half his age to get a taste of someone else. The theme of men resisting commitment is in here somewhere, but the play's individual moments stay isolated and don't accumulate emotionally or thematically; by the play's end, when one of the guys wanders around the stage naked, there's every indication that we're meant to find his actions sobering and serious, but the jokey, snickering play hasn't earned that.

Measure for Measure: Provide Your Own Block and Axe

On the upside, Measure for Measure will never be a "problem play" again: thanks to Doug Silver's cuts and Andrew Frank's circus-like modernization, this Shakespeare adaptation is very clearly a comedy. However, the constant mugging for attention, from both the characters on-stage and the actors watching (like cheerleaders) from the sidelines makes too many of the jokes flat, and the slimming changes to the text have made too many of the characters less than one-dimensional. Ato Essandoh stands out as the lecherous Angelo; he does so by being the only one who takes the show seriously enough to earn our laughter.

[Read on]

A Mikvah

With more ambition than skill, a good deal of A Mikvah attempts a non-linear collage that illustrates its main character's mental and emotional distress on the occasion of a major life crisis. Characters from past and present simultaneously speak (too often in generalities and platitudes) to him and to each other as if in a fragmented dream: dialogue is repeated elliptically, or said in unison, or reduced to phrases that overlap one another. The text is problematic - this heavy-handed mood-making persists long after we're ready for specificity and clarity, and then there's an out-of-nowhere non-fictional supporting character (grown-up JTT, the former child star of Home Improvement) whose sassy brand of world-weary seems to be from a totally different play. Besides some less-than-credible acting from the ensemble (Max Jenkins, as JTT, is an exception) the production suffers from a lack of attention to detail. The highly theatrical style that is attempted here depends very much on the strength of its imagery, and it's sloppy to assign a profound spiritual meaning to water, for example, and then have it carried out on stage in what looks like a plastic storage bin from The Container Store.

Chaser

It's been a couple of years since the taut and sexually explicit Extra Virgin was an attention-getting Fringe Festival hit. This year the same playwright, Howard Walters, has another intense and edgy one-act in the Festival that also has two gay men (literally and figuratively) going at it. This one is sharper and even more provocative, an engrossing drama in which confident, quick-thinking Val (Wil Petre) has a secret agenda while aggressively putting the moves on gun-shy Dominick (Jake Alexander) on their first date. Both actors are excellent and well-matched, bringing a palpable sense of emotional (and sexual) danger to even their most benign interplay, and Shaun Peknic's no-nonsense direction ably serves the play's intimate cold-eyed naturalism.

Also blogged by: [David]