FlagBoy
Warehouse – Next Door

Remaining performances:
Sunday, July 26 at 5 pm

They say: FlagBoy, a true and authentic coming-of-age story about family, friends, and HIV. Cornelius Jones Jr., a young southern black boy, explores his sexual identity as he navigates from the urban worlds of Virginia and D.C. to NYC.

Aaron’s take: It takes a good deal of courage to open up one’s life to an audience of strangers. And in some ways, Cornelius Jones’ life is a profile in courage. But I doubt he would describe it that way. More than anything else, FlagBoy is about coming to terms with who you are—and what’s impressive is Jones’ ability to transform that self-awareness into a frank, funny, and revealing one-man show.

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The A Cappella Party
Warehouse – Mainstage

Remaining performances:
Wednesday, July 22 at 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, July 25 at 4 p.m.
Sunday, July 26 at 12 p.m.

They say: Young lovers, Tony & Julie, get caught up in the competitive world of college a cappella. Both audition for Timbuktu University’s most prestigious (and rival) groups. Will the intense rivalry and hatred between the groups be enough to tear young love apart?

Aaron’s take: Before I begin, I should confess that I entered this show with my fair share of biases. I sang a cappella throughout my time in college — all five years of it. I have participated in the genre at its most orthodox and its most subversive. I have serenaded royalty and national television audiences, and I have performed sans sartorial constraint in front of — well, too many people to count.

The point is, I expected “The A Cappella Party” to strike a chord with me — or, more likely, to hit a nerve. And it did a little of each. It was a stroll down that grimy stretch of Memory Lane that you try to avoid past a certain hour but that still has its charms. All the old familiar places were there: the endless auditions where you pray for decent singers but secretly prefer the comically tone-deaf ones; the intra-group incest and its peculiar aftermath; and the age-old inter-group rivalries (though lacking in the one-sided hijinks to which I’m accustomed). Read the rest of this entry »

Pepe! The Mail Order Monkey Musical
The Mountain – at Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church

Remaining performances:
Saturday, July 18 at 5:30 pm
Wednesday, July 22 at 5:45 pm
Friday, July 24 at 10:30 pm
Saturday, July 25 at 8 pm

They say: “Broadway-style musical based on an infamous true tale: In the spring of 1968, two young brothers test suburban conventions when they order a live monkey from a comic book. The work is a unique collaboration by artists, composers, theater and film professionals.”

Aaron’s take: Ever wonder what would happen if you took The Stepford Wives and added a shit-flinging mail-order monkey? Strain your imagination no longer — Pepe holds all the answers.

Here’s the gist of it: In the seventh circle of suburbia, where routine is king, the mailman serves as entertainer-in-chief, and stifled housewives take solace in the bottle, two brothers — one rebellious and overmedicated, the other so exaggeratedly nerdy that he appears to have suffered from severe prenatal drug abuse — decide, out of boredom, to order a live monkey advertised in a comic book. Of course, the aforementioned (literal) shit hits the (proverbial) fan when the monkey, named Pepe, bursts in on the boys’ mother’s bridge game and abuses her terrifyingly Stepfordian friends.

But oh, what a monkey he is! Read the rest of this entry »

May 39th/40th
The Bodega at The Trading Post

Remaining performances:
Saturday, July 18 at 4 pm
Sunday, July 19 at 6:30 pm
Friday, July 24 at 11 pm

They say: “MAY 39th takes a voyeuristic ride through the morning after Sam and Louisa’s first date. In MAY 40th, Jim takes creative steps to heal Roya’s blindness. It’s 3009 AD: dating still blows chunks, and playing doctor is way more creepy.”

Aaron’s take: Okay, first of all, I’m pretty sure that description is just plain wrong. Unless I completely misinterpreted everything I saw (and there’s not much room for interpretation), Jim’s the one with the eye problems (though not blindness), and Roya’s the doctor who’s fed up with his whining. But no matter. Let’s get to the crux of it.

Every story, play, song, or artwork must on some level answer the question, “Why do we care?” And sometimes “Because it takes place in the future” just isn’t a good enough answer. That Louisa needs to kick Sam out so that she can “log on” rather than “go to work” doesn’t change the fact that we’ve heard this story a thousand times before, and it generally doesn’t interest us unless we’re the ones in bed.

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Dust of Babylon
The Shop at Fort Fringe

Remaining performances:
Saturday, July 11 at 6 pm
Sunday, July 12 at 5:30 pm
Wednesday, July 15 at 9:45 pm

They say: “Step into a black hole. The Greek experiment – Prometheus gave fire to mankind. Present – The Large Hadron Collinder searches for the God particle. Big Bang, Ancient Babylon, subatomic particles, tofu, Tuesdays, apples, boxes, Schrˆdinger. How far is too far?”

Aaron’s take: Got that? Me neither.

The difference between you and me, of course, is that I just sat through the damn thing. Somehow, the purplish amoebae squirming across the white backdrop; the pulsating trance music; the vaguely Southern drill sergeant who apparently represented Prometheus and babbled incessantly about Nimrod; and the random invocations of the periodic table didn’t really clear things up for me. Neither did the haphazardly flying and falling objects or the interminable bouts of shouted nonsense that invariably seemed to give way to exercises in conjugation.

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Name: Aaron Wiener
Hometown: Princeton, NJ
Years in D.C.: Coming up on one.
First CapFringe? Indeedy.
Shows I’m Seeing: ‘Dust of Babylon’ and ‘May 39th/40th,’ so far.
Random Things You Might Find Revealing About My Sensibilities: My criticism usually involves climate change and biofuels, so theater will be a welcome change of pace.