Sodomy & Pedicures

****

Fringe Festival


Though this was your standard "Hi, I'm me!" one person coming-of-age format complete with the deconstructions of one's own self doubt and the obligatory mom and dad impersonations, the story that the lovely Jeanne d'Ork tells is pretty damn absorbing. In a brisk 60 minutes Ms. d'Ork maintains clear focus on one of the primary struggles of her life: how does one remain a credit to their gender and still secretly want to get held down and done in the butt? Climbing all over a fuzzy red couch she told hilarious stories of being denied barbies and lipstick by her hardcore feminist mom and communist dad. The blessed result of their rearing is that we have here a a very hysterical, surprisingly well-adjusted woman who performs one person shows that I think her parents would be very proud of. And though we have enormously differing sexual boundaries (give me Tony's phone number, I'll gladly let him hold me down) she has definitely earned this sodomite's respect. Favorite line: "Get the fuck `outta there! I've got to save something for my husband!"

PB&J

PB&J must be made from that chunky kind (which makes sense, if the secret ingredient is penis), because Tara Dairman's script is dangerously uneven. At times, it works as a satire of our careless consumerism (along with the emasculating consequences), but more often than not, it just dives into dick-based humor (care to guess what our reporter hero, Dick Longfellow, is blessed with?). Ultimately, even though Cyndy A. Marion bolstered the jokes with Viagra-efficient staging, PB&J fell a little short.

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FRINGE: Bukowsical

Photo/Lili Von Schtupp

Spencer Green and Gary Stockdale aren't as ambitious (or as timely) as Mark Hollman and Greg Kotis (of Urinetown fame), but their crude, lewd, and toe-tapping musical, Bukowskical! plays pitch-perfect to anyone who's ever picked up a pencil. From the advice of that good to the last drop muse, Sweet Lady Booze ("Take Me"), to the instruction of masochistic parents ("Art is Pain"), to the down, dark, and dirty advice of Faulkner, Plath, Williams, and Burroughs ("Writing Lesson"), Bukowsical transforms hardship into hilarity, and though it veers way off the path of Bukowski's life (even more so than its metadramatic presentation as a backer's audition), it only does so to squeeze in a few more debauched jokes. Bukowski (Brad Blaisdell) makes the jazz is downright lascivious on "Love Is (A Dog From Hell)," and Fleur Phillips, who plays Buk's One True Love, is the perfect coloratura contrast on songs like "Chaser of My Heart" or the contrapuntal duet of "Remember Me"/"Elegy." I had a wonderful time, got blown away by all but one of the cast (Ian Gould), and seriously recommend this to everyone.

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Riding The Bull

photo: Jonathan Slaff


What a whimsical, charming parable! This two person comedy about God, greed, guilt, and love is just further evidence that the Fringe Festival is acquiring better and better material every year. Skinny rodeo clown, GL teams up with fat rancher, Lyza in a lucrative partnership that sends them both on those life changing journeys that good playwrights write about. Direction is tight and our actors (Will Ditterline and Liz Dailey) are loaded with that in-spite-of-themselves charm that makes this production happily gallop along. I noticed that there are no Texan credits for the director and the cast, and though, as stated, this is a great production, our characters were a little more generically southern than down home rural Texan. This born and bred Texan thinks that this play would be PERFECT for Stages Repertory in Houston, Texas.

Also blogged by: [Aaron] and [Patrick]

the7 battles thebest

*

The Ice Factory Festival

The good news is that I have never before seen anything like the7 battles thebest. The bad news is I had no fucking clue what was going on. The first red flag was the presence of a glossary in the program. I hate having to "study up" prior to Act 1, Scene 1. That's MY time to swig a beer, cruise the audience and pee. Less than 5 minutes into the production I was already lost in this futuristic cyber-terrorism epic battle for something that only rock music could fix (guesstimation). Among the live band, the dancers, cameras, and projection screens, a rock group desperately tries to spell out the incatracies of their dire situation and after a while I gave up trying to comprehend their explanations and just hoped that they knew what they were talking about. When one of the big rock music numbers ended with a big classic rock flourish and the audience wasn't sure if they were supposed to clap or not, I got the sense that I wasn't the only person who was adrift in this Confusapalooza. The sad thing is that there are tons of very talented performers (Matt Schuneman- excellent vocals/guitar work- would be a great HGA if pix could be located) and technicians who have spent a lot of time and creative energy on this cybertheatermess. There is hope though as this is an episode in a larger artistic journey by this group called Anonymous Ensemble. Perhaps the next installment won't need a glossary.

Also blogged by [Aaron]

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.