Riding The Bull

photo: Jonathan Slaff

When GL, a God-fearing rodeo clown, takes up with Fat Lyza, the surly no-nonsense woman who's vandalized the town's nativity scene, August Schulenburg's supremely intelligent and entertaining Riding The Bull plays at first like a homespun losers-in-love comic fable. But when it turns out that Lyza, upon climax, can dependably predict tomorrow's winning bull rider (thanks to God's intervention) and that GL's most faith-based use for the resulting gambling profits is to seek out that falsest of American gods (Elvis) the play reveals a thematic richness and a captivating complexity under its deceptively simple folkloric surface. There's a great deal of humor and sadness in this carefully constructed two-hander: the humor never slips into apathetic snickering at faith, and the sadness is the real thing (read: not the easy, sentimental kind). It's a remarkable play with a distinctive vision of America, which in this evocative, judiciously staged production boasts excellent, perfectly modulated performances from Will Ditterline and Liz Dailey. Recommended; part of the Fringe Festival.

Also blogged by: [Aaron] and [David]

Show Choir! The Musical

In "VH1 Behind The Music" style, this Fringe Fest musical recounts the rise and fall of a fictional superstar show choir (think big smiles, sequined uniforms and the blandest kind of geeky choir pop) who for a time take the international music scene by storm. That's a joke to anyone who has even the slightest awareness of what drives pop music, but this show is a mockumentary only by dint of it being make-believe; it isn't shaped to be spoof, nor satire, nor camp. It's depressingly earnest and unimaginative - we're meant to go along with the conceit, and watch as one band-breaking-up cliche plays out after another: fame goes to the choir director's head and he hogs the spotlight, one choir girl gets drunk and becomes fodder for the gutter press, the songwriter starts moonlighting elsewhere, and so on. There is nothing at stake in this straight-faced fantasy - the documentary format doesn't even invite us to root for the choir to be a success, since that's a given at the start - and the show exists in a vacuum, not the least bit interested in commenting on real-life pop culture at all. It's nothing more than an excuse for sequins and songs.

FRINGE: The Commission

For a play about war crimes, I found The Commission to be very light: fitting only in that the Dreamscape Theater didn't have to change their name to the Nightmare Theater to produce this. But although I found the backward narrative to be gimmicky and ineffective, and thought that three of the four scenes were obvious and far too straightforward to leave a mark, I want to use this space to applaud the one scene, a playlet, if you will, that did scar the viewer. In this scene, Paula (Susan Ferrara) and Karl (Patrick Melville) are at their most insidiously domestic: naked and sexed out, lying atop an opulent carpet, and blissfully adulterous. The war illustrated here is a battle of the sexes, and the undercurrent of the war crimes commission, of which Karl and Paula are a part of, ripples into their treatment of one another. As long as they can compromise without compromising their own positions, they are cheerful and besotted with one another. However, when it comes time to yield, Paula suddenly grows nasty, threatening to destroy Karl's career. In turn, and with very little prodding, Karl flips the situation back on Paula, dehumanizing her in the process. The subtle twist that seals the scene is the look on Ferrara's face as she yields to Karl's rape of her, as if she can somehow screw even this most bitter of defeats into something useful for herself. Worse still than her self-rationalization is the thought that perhaps she actually needs this as well: that's the graphic, thought-provoking theater that we need more of.

[Read on] [Also blogged by: Patrick]

bombs in your mouth

photo by: John Scott

****

bipolar/wej productions

THIS IS AN EXCELLENT FRINGE PRODUCTION. In this play a half sister returns home to Minnesota from New York for the death of her father and is immersed right back into toxic environment that the father had raised his two "poopers" in. The brother/sister chemistry between Cory Patrick and Cass Bugge could not have been any more authentic as they arm wrestled, played chugging games and were able to scream bitterly and bust each other up laughing all within the span of a single line. Their rich, scarily natural characterizations made this already well written play about figuring out what to do with the dead asshole's shit a top notch Fringe offering.

Also blogged by: [Patrick]

FRINGE: Freedom! And the Sticky End of Make-Believe

The catch to making universal theater or "inspiring international dialogue" is that you have to speak very broadly. In the case of Freedom! and the sticky end of make-believe, there's also a loss of nuance and intelligibility. Not that there isn't intelligence in Savannah Theatre Project's political cry; but Thom Pasculli's text is drowned out beneath the many theatrical experiments. A more focused director than Allison Talis might be able to call it Theater of the Absurd, but the work just comes across as a checklist: stilts, a pseudo duet (with an old recording of "Keep Young & Beautiful"), flashlights on a dark stage, physical repetition, distortion, roller skates, musical interludes (sax, oboe, tambourine), avant garde dances layered with sheets, and a teddy bear named God. What's good is some of the acting from the broad and excitable cast, but better (and stranger) satires have been made of war. There's--sadly--nothing here we haven't seen before.

The Other Side Of Darkness

A nearly relentless back and forth volley of bitter between a bankrupt gay playwright (apparently those huge Broadway hits of his youth that we keep hearing about don't bring in any licensing fees) and his screen actress wife (she's popular enough to be in competition with Meryl Streep for starring roles - my palm is still hot from laughing into it), this play's first act is full of the kind of pained tragic-glamorous sighs that used to be heaved in the '40s to indicate the more sophisticated agonies of the well-off. Oh darling, the suffering, how can we endure the suffering! The characters aren't convincing for a second (for instance Kristy Cates doesn't seem to realize that she's playing a Narcissist, which is understandable, considering that the playwright doesn't seem to realize he's trying to write one) and there are wearying, witless cliches when they spar where cutting zingers should be. The second act (which, excluding an epilogue, flashes back a couple of decades to their first meet-cute) is better and gives the actors the chance to show that they are playing humans rather than ice machines, but it's already too late: the Merrily We Roll Along-like reverse chronology has already forced the characters on us at their most aggressively unlikeable for over an hour before there's any reason to care about them. The play's one mitigating factor is that there's a third character, a Hollywood agent whose affair with the husband seems to span decades, whose chief purpose seems to be to provide comic relief. By default he also provides the play's only signs of real life. Rob Maitner, who plays him, is a miracle worker: everytime he makes an entrance the play rises from the dead.