I haven’t seen The Tea Party Project yet, but it’s clear enough that The DC Theatre Collective understands, at the very least, how to promote their show. Their “living newspaper”-format history of the Tea Party movement — told through cited excerpts from the remarks and writings of Glenn Beck, Rep. Michelle Bachmann, and other conservative opinion-makers and pols — has caught the attention of its subjects. Jillian Bandes wrote a piece about it for the conservative website Town Hall before it opened on July 9.

At their 10 p.m. performance of The Tea Party Project last Friday, DCTC co-founder Jenny Lynn Towns had to call a brief time-out to ask a couple seated in the front row to stop making a video recording of it. I caught up with Towns at Fort Fringe about an hour after the show ended to talk about that episode, and about why, out of nearly 140 shows in the Capital Fringe Festival this year, so few of them seem to address contemporary politics.