FRINGE: "Better This Way"

Everything about Better This Way sets itself up to be the opposite of what it calls itself: the characters believe they are interesting, not strange; the show is billed as an "original theatrical event"; the company's name is "Deliberate Motion"; and then, oh yeah, there's the title. The actions of these doomed lovers (Tina Nikolova, Scott Troost, and Shannon Fillion) may be deliberate, but they come across as random. In that, it is similar to Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions, which took the essence of love and obfuscated it near beyond recognition. However, while Danielewski's book could at least fall back on recognizable postmodern aestheticism, this collaborative show only achieves brief moments of early, movement based cinema. Their ideas--murmurs of text really amid a series of slow, gentle movements--hang loosely from the starved plot (which, if it is to believed, makes the trio into an odd pantheon of miserable gods). Nor does Greg Polin's film, a sort of living background, help to nourish the script: emptiness, OK, I get it; now what are you going to spend the next fifty minutes doing? There's a great closing line ("You can't fall out of love the way you fell into it; you have to crawl out of it") and I admire the quiet, sexual angst, but the play is too gentle for its own good.

Madonna And Child And Other Divas

For the most (and best) part, Tom Johnson's play (currently part of the Fringe Festival) earnestly concerns an evangelical Christian who fights against his homosexual temptations. We see him struggling over the course of his adult life: driven from a Baptist college in the mid-'50s under threat of being exposed as a sodomite, courting and marrying a young woman some years later who believes it is her mission from God to save him from his sinful desires, and most incredibly (because this is based on a true story) undergoing an exorcism to rid him of the "homosexual demon" after a gay affair is uncovered. Johnson mostly steers clear of satirizing these characters - much of the play paints a serious and realistic picture of a gay man facing prejudice and intolerance from well-meaning "love the sinner but hate the sin" people. Apart from the curious touch of having stacks of Bibles substitute for meals or telephones (we hardly need *that* to get the omnipresence of Scripture in this world) this much of the play is effective and memorable. What doesn't work so well is the framing device which runs through the play: one of its aims is to provide analogous, self-loathing action in current times, but it's too underdeveloped to make that point. Stand out performances from Joe Pindelski, Dan Via, and Kay Wilson.

the7 battles thebest

The Best is back with a new episode of their underground theater-rock show about a group of pop-icon rebels against an oppressive government, and this time it's bigger, better, and more epic than ever before. At the same time, it's still suffering from some cryptic jokes and, because of the sound system, many indecipherable lyrics. That just makes it more like old-school late night MTV, not less, and there's much that's good to be said for Jim Iseman III's music and Andrew Davey's choreograph (both of which are more varied than in past episodes). Eamonn Farrell's direction is tight for a show that's so ambitious with multimedia, and his script, while still prone to bouts of childishness, is fairly clever and builds well upon the two previous OEDI episodes. Seeing The Best is always a bit of an unexpected treat, so go get your freak on.

[Read on]

Will Durst: The All-American Sport Of Bipartisan Bashing

photo: Jason E. Grossman

In an age when smug irony and sarcasm characterize most political comedy, Will Durst's relaxed, regular-guy approach seems almost revolutionary. Declaring himself a moderate near the top of his eighty-minute show, and delivering his comic observations and barbed one-liners with so much affable, conversational warmth that you may be tempted to talk back to him, Durst puts us at ease by passing the "just folks" authenticity test. Then the gloves come off. The sharply written, highly entertaining show takes swings both left and right (okay, more right; Durst admits that it's tougher to skewer the Democrats because you can't "make fun of a vacuum") with a few special knockout punches aimed squarely for George W. Bush. (One of the best among them shows Durst at his most wryly amusing: he simply reads actual Bush quotes verbatim. Example: "Increasingly, more and more of our imports are coming from overseas.") Once we're past the awkward but brief video introduction that opens the show, the evening's one misstep, the show never hits anything that could be called a lull. Durst may convince as a smart and cool regular Joe but make no mistake, he's got a showman's intuition for the mood of an audience and knows when to move a bit along. More often, he's got to worry about slowing one down, because many of his bits are so delicious that we want to savor them. His long list of political oxymorons is a case in point: "Republican Ethics Committee", "Democratic Leadership Council", "FOX News". The show is advertised as political comedy for people who have had it with current politics. I'll go further than that: Will Durst is a comedian for people who have had it with current political comedy.

Also blogged by: [Aaron]

FRINGE: "Riding the Bull"

Photo/Jonathan Slaff

In America, everybody's lonely. August Schulenburg's honest satire, Riding the Bull, takes two Southern-grown heroes--an awkward rodeo clown and the rightly named "Fat" Lyza--and looks to connect to, rather than demean, the world around us. In rapid succession, Schulenburg gives us glimpses of loneliness being tackled by focused intensity (on, say, milking a cow), constant sex (otherwise known as "temptation"), money (the American solution), faith, and finally, love itself. That this is all done without bucking us from the saddle is due largely to the likability of the cast and Kelly O'Donnell's intelligent direction.

[Read on] [Also reviewed by: Patrick] [David]

PN 1923.45 LS01 V. 2 (The Book Play)

Penned by Bixby Elliot (really enjoyed his Blueprint at SPF recently) and featuring Everett Quinton, I was expecting this comedy to be one of the highlights of the Fringe Festival. Unfortunately, it needs work, and only occasionally demonstrates how funny and touching it could be after some sleeves are rolled back up. The play has an unusual structure, alternating between the romantic interests of a gay man in 1981 and of a bookish woman in 1951 (the connecting tissue is that each works as the rare books librarian in the same sub-basement, thirty years apart) but the bifurcation doesn't pay any comic dividends until near the end of the play. (The scene where it does pay, however, hits the jackpot.) More seriously idling the play too long in neutral is yet another set of alternated scenes (monologues, actually) in which Everett Quinton, as a gay activist, holds forth in queer manifesto mode. I see the thematic importance of this, but the monologues don't build from one to another: generally, once you've seen the first one you've seen them all. Additionally, the male librarian's story becomes unclear at the eleventh hour - I thought I understood the specifics of his issues with his boyfriend, and then they went for another round of fighting that made me not like or understand either of them. And yet, with all that said, it is clear that there is a worthwhile, potentially moving play here struggling to make itself known that touches on shame and the constant (but constantly changing) danger of not making oneself known to the world.

Also blogged by: [Aaron]