bombs in your mouth

photo: John Scott

In this intimate and often funny hour-long slice of dysfunctional life (by Rude Mechanicals member Corey Patrick, who also co-stars with Cass Bugge) we watch half-siblings Danny and Lily reunite after their father's bizarre funeral service. The old man was full-out crazy and mean (his last will and testament, scribbled on a roll of toilet paper, favors the child who ran out six years ago instead of the one who stayed behind with him) so the two are in no mood to shed tears and share hugs. Instead they deal with the loss by chugging down beers, arm wrestling like growling animals, and lashing out at each other's judgments like overgrown passive-aggressive children. The crisp, believable dialogue and the detailed, committed performances give bombs in your mouth a credibility and a vibrancy that make it ideally realized - I've lost count of how many small two-character Fringe shows I've seen over the years that lacked the skill to achieve the believability (and, ultimately, the heart) that this one does.

Also blogged by: [David]

FRINGE: Helmet

Ah, how quickly potential can be squandered by a poor actor and an unhinged director. Douglas Maxwell's done his homework in writing the video-game inspired play Helmet, and his parallels between the escapism of Nintendo and the reality of America is nicely done. Along those lines, Troy David Mercier gives a gripping performance as the ADD gamer of our current generation: distant and distracting, but not so much that we can't relate. But Michael Evans Lopez is as a scripted a partner as bad artificial intelligence, and director Maryann Lombardi has filled the play with meaningless physical actions and aimless, mechanical intonations, all of which dispel what needs to be, at heart, a realistic story.

[Read on]

Will Durst: The All-American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing

I really enjoyed Will Durst's show, but in the spirit of bipartisan bashing, I'm going to start this review with a critique: don't ever start your one-man show with a video montage. Everyone there (1) already knows who you are, (2) doesn't care who you are, or (3) got a free ticket. Along the same lines, don't spend the next ten minutes telling the audience what your show isn't. To avoid making the same mistake, I'll skip to what Durst is: a very likable guy, with Bill Murray-like charm. He starts hunched-over, a mopey, self-effacing schlub; stands erect, breaking his deadpan to cackle maniacally; then is suddenly an average Joe again. Unlike other political satirists who lord their intelligence (Dennis Miller), bask in the ridiculous (Bill Maher), indulge in innocence (Jon Stewart), or break out apoplectic antics (Lewis Black), Durst is just an observant fellow who reads the news and saves it for a rainy day.

[Read on] [Also blogged by: Patrick]

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]