Being a numerological recap of the 2010 Capital Fringe Festival in glorious 2-D Julianne-O-Vision.

We’ve left in a few cameo appearances by Founding Institutional Memory Trey Graham’s other half’s beer-drinking hand to preserve the cinema vérité atmosphere. If you recognize yourself as the owner of the voice that can periodically be heard remarking “Yeeeaah!” and “YeeeeEEEEEEAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHH!”, please identify yourself in the comments. The Shakespeare Theatre Company has a pair of season tickets for you.

DISCLAIMER: Actually, we just made up that thing about the Shakespeare Theatre Company wanting to give you tickets. But it’s an impressive set of pipes you’re sporting there, drunky.

The Critics agree: Ridgefield Middle School Talent Nite was the funniest show we saw in this year’s Capital Fringe Festival. The Critics being, in this case, Fringe & Purge Action News and Commentary Squad Founding Institutional Memory Trey Graham and yours truly.

Festival honchos Julianne Brienza and Scot McKenize would seem to agree with our agreement: At the Pick of the Fringe Awards Sunday night, they presented Jo Firestone and Dylan Marron, the writers and performers of the show, with the Directors’ Award, recognizing an outstanding artist in each year’s fringe as chosen by Brienza, McKenzie, and their associates. There may be no bragging rights in theater, but this prize comes with some very practical perks: GoHorses, Firestone and Marron’s company, is automatically accepted into next year’s Capital Fringe lineup. They’ll receive a free advertising package and their participation fee will be waived. Not too shabby.

Trey and I sat down with the pair shortly after they collected their award to discuss their show and its origins. We’d give you a one-sentence synopsis, but it’s in the title for crying out loud, and anyway, we’re going to get Jo & Dylan to do that. Senior Fringe & Purge Action News and Commentary Squad member/comics obsessive Glen Weldon has pointed out that some of our X-treme camera angles create the impression this interview took place in Catwoman’s secret lair; you may rest assured that was utterly intentional.

Er, hi.

So, about last night . . . um, you’re not going to be weird, are you? No one wants for things to be weird between us. We at Fringe & Purge truly, sincerely value your readership, and we don’t want anything to get in the way of that.

Anything else — look, the last three weeks have been an emotional time, for you, surely, as well as for us. And last night, at the Gypsy Tent, after the Pick of the Fringe Awards had been given and the Southampton Double White Ale kept flowing and DJ Smudge kept playing all that Prince and The Clash and David Bowie and James Brown and Talking Heads like it was nineteen-seventy-goddamn-nine or something, and we are just fine with this . . . Anyway, do you think we can still be friends?

Truth: Fringe & Purge is off to a late start this morn — er, afternoon, on account of having spent the first half of today seeking some long-delayed medical attention for a shoulder injury sustained in the course of activities utterly unrelated to whatever may or may not have occurred at the Baldacchino Gypsy Tent last night after some loud-talkin’ chump stepped up to Fringe & Purge all like, “Season Three of Slings & Arrows was a huge disappointment!” You do not want to be peddling that kind of insolent jibber jabber.

Read more The (cough) Morning After

In Which Three WCP Theater Critics Set Out To Discuss Matters of Pressing Import, But Get Stuck Bitching About Draconian Late-Seating Policies, Tapped Kegs and The Fact That The Apothecary is HOT AS BALLS.

Glen Weldon: All right, Graham. Klimek.  It’s about time we blew the lid off a subject that THE MAN doesn’t want us to talk about.  A topic TOO HOT for polite discussion.  An issue that cuts to the very heart of the meat of the bone of the gist of Fringe.

Late seating. Comma why Fringe does not permit.

Look: The rest of the year, I loathe latecomers as much as any thinking person. They stumble over you in the brief darkness between scenes 2 and 3, reeking of entitlement and Chardonnay. They are to be mocked, abjured, pelted with fruit.

But something happened this year. Is happening. And it’s particular to Fringe: For the first time in my four years as a theater critic, I’ve been late to two shows in one week.

Neither time was my fault, except in the sense that both were totally my fault. (Graham, you’re a stickler for this; care to share your prim, nanny-like stance with the class?) Nevertheless, I submit that DC’s random! 20! minute! Green Line delays and rush hour gridlock on Mass Ave. played supporting roles.

Last Wednesday, when I sprang out of the unmoving cab four blocks away from the Goethe Institut, ran/hobbled through the broth-like air to arrive at PRECISELY 6:00 ON THE DOT, I was turned aside by the Fringe volunteer at the door.

“We’re closed,” she said.

Perched on my forearm, my falcon Cholmondeley let forth a querulous squawk from beneath his hood; he sensed my surprise.

“I’m …. sorry?” I asked.

“Closed,” she said. “The show’s started. You can go to the box office to get a later ticket, or try to get a refund, if you …”

“My good lady,” I said, tossing my vermilion opera cape over one shoulder with a flourish. “Do you know …. who… I …. am?”

She blinked at me, saying nothing. Clearly my erudition and breeding had dazzled the poor, dull thing.

I rapped the silver handle of my walking stick (an exquisite piece, shaped into the head of a doberman, with eyes of polished onyx) against the table peremptorily.

“Come come,” I said, “I am Glen Weldon. Of the Washington. City. Paper. …’s blog. I am a CRITIC.”

She stared.

“Your petty laws do not apply to one such as I,” I said. Cholmondeley’s feathers ruffled in sympathy. “Now let me in, that’s a good girl, and I shan’t report this affront to various and sundry Fringe board members, with whom I play whist and peasant-chess every fortnight. They will surely dock your pay, insolent wretch.”

“I’m a volunteer, fuckface,” she spat.

Read more Critical Mass: The Unbearable Lateness of Being a Fringegoer and Other Matters

2 Reprises: In PURSUIT of the ENGLISH Rose and DISORDEr

Venue: Goethe-Institut – Mainstage

Remaining Performance:

Saturday, July 24, 11 a.m.

They say: “Laugh, cry, fall in love, with a cockney and a hoarder! 2006 CapFringe sell-out ‘English’ recreates Rose’s wit and pathos surviving Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing’s Post-War London. ‘DISORDEr’ humorously exposes PakratPatty’s Collector-itis and Disposophobia — an obsessive-compulsive’s must-see! Comedy-Drama Double Bill.

Chris’s take: 2 Reprises is a double-bill of one-woman shows by local actress Hilary Kascer.  The first piece is adapted from a memoir by the same name of post-war London by Doris Lessing. In it, Kascer embodies a woman named Rose Jennings who loved a Canadian boy killed in the war, and is now in her calculating way courting the man from whom she buys her cigarettes. The second piece, DISORDEr, is a first-person account of a hoarder, Pakrat Patty, trying to keep her obsessive need to be surrounded by her junk from derailing her love life.

There’s no strong thematic link between the two pieces, except perhaps for the fact that Patty’s mother lived in London in wartime.

What really struck me, though, was how different the experience of watching the two pieces was, despite the fact that both are essentially monologues by the same actress. In the first piece, Kascer, as Rose, addresses an imaginary and absent Doris Lessing. Kascer, in other words, performs for us but not to us–we’re just eavesdropping.  In the second piece, Patty addresses us directly, and we are more in the realm of performance art than of theater.

Read more Hip Shot: ‘2 Reprises’

The Tea Party Project

Redrum – at Fort Fringe

Remaining performance:

Sunday, July 25 at 5 p.m.

They say: Steeped in tea party hysteria? Try sipping facts. THE TEA PARTY PROJECT exposes the truth behind the tricorn hats – the funny, the bizarre, and the downright horrifying.

Aaron’s take: I’ll say right off the bat that most of the audience on Thursday evening really enjoyed this show. If, in fact, “show” is the right word for it. It is, in some ways, much more of a dramatic lecture, or even a political rally, than a true work of theater. Most in attendance seemed prepared for this, and ready to eat it up. I was not.

I also have to confess that when I’m not Fringing and Purging — which, let’s admit it, is about 99.9% of my life — I spend my days working at a newspaper that covers the Tea Party movement ad nauseam. I am not, then, predisposed to regard a pedantic rundown of the hypocrisy and racism of Tea Partiers as entertainment. But some people are! Maybe you’re one of them! After all, while I shifted in my seat, nearly everyone around me groaned in appreciative disgust as the show’s narrators barked “Fact!” and rattled off statistics about Tea Partiers’ predilection for gun violence and ignorance of our president’s true nationality and religion. And they were grateful when, upon exit, they were handed pamphlets urging them to “TAKE ACTION.”

The Tea Party Project’s performers are clearly very talented and passionate about their cause. But that cause is not theater.

See It If: Your DVR is devoted exclusively to The Ed Show.

Skip It If: You are yourself a Tea Partier. Trust me, this ain’t the show for you.

Yes, it does say, right there at the bottom, ‘I can’t believe I had to make this sign.’

The Imaginary Autopsee

The Clinic – 1006 6th St. NW

Remaining Performances:

Friday, July 23, at 6 p.m.

They say: “A classic Commedia dell’Arte play complete with impossible situations, mistaken identity, and a happily ever after ending! Wild physical comedy, innuendo, and improvisation make sure that any audience member watching The Imaginary Autopsee will laugh themselves TO DEATH!”

Derek’s Take: If the thought of a show stuffed with “stock” characters sets off your stereotype alarm, The Imaginary Autopsee kindly advises you to chill the hell out.  I mean, we’re talking the 16^th Century here.  And Autopsee, anyway, is an equal opportunity lampooner:  in its world of nutty masters and servants, everyone exudes a buffoonish and energetic charm that transcends boilerplate, even for the politically correct.

Roger Payano’s production begins with an announcement stunning to modern ears:  Dottore (Jeff Hylden), the revered medicine man of his tiny burg, doesn’t buy the claims of arterial science and vows to disprove the theory of closed circulation.  An open system it must be!  This, though, is of little concern to Pantalone, the stooped treasure-seeker who asks to marry Isabella, the doctor’s daughter.  The proposition’s a go until Dottore’s imperious wife gets involved, applying a smackdown worthy of her officious German accent and Idi Amin-like medallion-wear.  There will be no such marriage on her watch.

Read more Hip Shot: ‘The Imaginary Autopsee’

American Theater Ensemble has been enjoying a sold out run of its Capital Fringe presentation of A Walk In the Woods, a triumph sweetened by the news the company has been invited by the nonproliferation advocacy organization The Ploughshares Fund to perform the play next week for members of Congress. (That performance is closed to the general public.)

Lee Blessing’s Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-nominated drama follows two negotiators, Russian Andrey Botvinnik, and American John Honeyman, as they try to hash out an arms reduction agreement during the Cold War.

With consideration of the New START treaty currently underway, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D.-Mass.) and ranking member Dick Lugar (R.-Ind.) both having made it known they want to vote on ratification before Congress goes into recess on August 7, the production couldn’t be more timely.

Those of us who are following the Capital Fringe Festival closely are fascinated by how the theatrical community in Washington interacts with the policy community. Fringe & Purge’s Sophia Bushong sat down with AET Artistic Director Martin Blank to get his take.

Read more Fringe Interview: American Theater Ensemble’s Martin Blank

The Apothecary

Remaining Performance:

Saturday, July 24, at 8 p.m.

They Say: “A tale of two strangers, who by chance, stumbled upon Odissi — an Indian classical dance. This playful story depicts their transformation in dance as they journey from sublime to divine. Their stories are captured through narration, story telling, and dance.”

Trey’s Take: Y’know, what they say up there? That’s pretty much exactly what it is. Playful? Check. (Viz: flashes of humor in the script, plus unexpected music cues from Slumdog Millionaire’s infectious “Jai Ho” to Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home.”) Elements of dance? Check. (Two substantial solos, a shorter duet at the finale, plus brief snippets of movement in various scenes of study or rehearsal.) Narration and story? Check.

Well, semi-check. The book — at least what we’d call the book, if this were, y’know, a musical — is the weakest element of this hourlong autobiographical show from Nazanin Baygani and Lisa Santhanam. The voiceovers, which do both expositional and explanatory work as the ladies get to know each other Stateside and travel to India to learn more about their discipline,  can be a touch wordy; the dialogue, which seems either underwritten or awkwardly improvised, gets overridden on occasion by the recorded music and the sound of the bells dancers wear around their ankles in Odissi and other classical Indian styles. (And by the whir of fans, for which thank god: The Apothecary has been one of the warmer Fringe venues.)

Read more Hip Shot: ‘From Sublime to Divine’