Fringe: when last we flew

Tony Kushner is lucky to be getting such a touching homage to his masterpiece Angels in America in Harrison David Rivers's when last we flew. Rivers clearly loves the play and isn't trying to rewrite it. The play takes place in Kansas and there are no characters dying from AIDS or closeted Mormons. At a little under 2 hours, it's not the epic that Angels is. It does, however, remind us of the power of literature.

The central characters are two African-American high school students. Paul (Jon-Michael Reese) reads Angels in America obsessively. As he struggles with his sexuality and deals with the feelings of alienation brought on by his father leaving, he finds solace in the play as well as his bathroom--the only room in his house with a lock. Natalie (Rory Lipede--remember that name) is an exceptional student who gets kicked out of her private school when she realizes that she wants to stand up for injustice. Rivers uses imagery and lines from Angels in America to invoke a similar feeling of fantasy. My guess is that a knowledge of the play isn't required to be moved by when last we flew, but I wonder how someone unfamiliar with Angels would take scenes such as Natalie crash landing into Paul's bathroom.

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Fringe: Möbius

Photo: Tim Palin

What do you get if you mix Proof, a bad Twilight Zone episode, and a tin ear? Michael López Sáenz’s Möbius, currently playing as part of the Fringe Festival. From the long, unsuccessful, opening monologue, to the long, unsuccessful, closing monologue, Möbius attempts to achieve thoughtful significance but instead strings together dated cliches, two-dimensional characters, pointless arguments, murky chronology, and unsurprising and/or uninteresting twists. Montgomery and Mackenzie are 17-year-old twins; Montgomery is gay and is scared to come out to his parents; their father has barely been at home in the previous three months; their mother is, we are told again and again, controlling, though we mostly see her be petulant. Everyone is furious at everyone else. The question is why, and the answer is not as interesting as it should be. The performers are awkward and unconvincing in similar ways, which makes me think that director Jeanine DeFalco has a lot to answer for. The one scene that works occurs in a gym locker room when Montgomery tries to ask out the (straight) guy of his dreams, who is strutting around naked.

Fringe: Hamlettes

Photo: Brian Hashimoto

The vast majority of shows would be improved by being 15 minutes shorter. Hamlettes is the rare play that needs--and deserves--to be expanded. Written by Patrick Shaw and directed by Lillian Meredith, Hamlettes follows three 12-year-old girls as their Drama Club unravels due to jealousies and changing alliances after two of the girls decide to speak Shakespeare-ese 24/7. Shaw's decision to use heightened language lends the girls' emotions a gravitas that they might overwise lack--and, since these girls are dealing with serious, heart-felt issues, that gravitas is well-earned. (I've always disagreed with the idea that only mature actors can grasp Romeo and Juliet's deep emotions. Who feels emotion more profoundly than young teens?) Hamlettes, already fascinating, would be much improved if Shaw took more time establishing the relationships and showing the changes that the girls experience. Two or three more characters might help as well. (I would also lose the cutesy title.) But the main idea, that the emotions of tweens are no less important, meaningful, and dangerous than the emotions of Henry V or King Lear, provides a firm foundation on which to build.

Fringe: Getting Even With Shakespeare

For a play about Shakespeare, there are an awful lot of Beckett jokes. Though Matt Saldarelli's Getting Even With Shakespeare primarily deals with the playwright in the title, no one is safe in this hilarious madcap comedy which references everything from Star Wars to Pirandello.

The play takes place in a bar where Shakespearean tragic heroes hang out in between shows (whenever their plays are performed anywhere in the world, they have to be there). Josh Odsess-Rubin is appropriately douchey as Hamlet, Patrick Pizzolorusso is the comedic standout as the angry Macbeth, John D'Arcangelo is the pitiful King Lear, Amanda Tudesco channels Blair Waldorf as the Upper East Side princess Juliet (the only character that has conformed to the times), and Ben Holmes is an adorably innocent Romeo. The bartender is an actress known as Ophelia #482, played delightfully as an airhead by Kelsey Formost. How these Ophelias come to be at this bar is never explained, but no matter--disbelief has to be suspended to enjoy this play.

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Fringe: The Secretaries

This comic exaggeration is about women who refuse to fit in--especially to the prim secretarial roles they've been assigned to at the Cooney Lumber Company in Big Bone, Oregon: "And once a month we kill a man and chop him up." But don't be fooled by the camp: the show is actually an attack on anything remotely ordinary or normalizing, from Slim-Fast shakes to expense accounts to Feminism itself. Mark Finley's direction isn't primal enough for this sort of rebel yell, especially since the dated comedy is no longer shocking in of itself, but the show is still fairly funny, and the cast--if it's not offensive to say so--is darling. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "Find a new vocation," and 5 being "There's a new executive in town," The Secretaries gets a 3.5.

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[Read Wendy's review]

Fringe: The Great Galvani

The Great Galvani promises "the highest of high-quality acts," so it opens with the Bearded Lady (Kevlyn Hayes) and her ruminations on appearance, then shifts to Galvani (H. B. Ward), who proceeds to conjure up some high-quality feces (out of his ass, naturally). It's a giant misdirect, as is the way he summons P. T. Barnum into his own body for a monologue, and if the show were longer than a half-hour, the clever philosophical "edutainment" that writer/director Shawn Reddy sneaks in under that hammy cover might really pack a punch. Even still, it calls to mind the rich minimalism of Will Eno's Thom Pain, what with the wry romanticism, the unavoidable habit to "love what will not last."

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