Author Archive
Hip Shot: ‘Dorks on the Loose: Facey Facey Face Face’
Dorks on the Loose: Facey Facey Face Face
The Baldacchino Gypsy Tent Bar – at Fort Fringe
Remaining Performances:
Friday, July 24th @ 7 pm
Saturday, July 25th @ 3:15 pm
Sunday, July 26th @ 7 pm
They say: Phaea and Becca don’t just have a face. They have two. And after last year’s Fringe success they are returning to celebrate with a new comedy show, Dorks on the Loose: Facey Facey Face Face. C’mon, you need a lift. 50 minutes
Chris says: Laurel and Hardy. Nichols and May. Lemmon and Mathau. Cheech and Chong. Phaea and Becca.
It’s not simple matter to explain what makes a comedy duo work: personality, chemistry, timing, and intellect are merely the more obvious variables. Loose dorks Phaea and Becca come off as an odd couple—one more conventionally tall and dorky, one at first glance too cute and cuddly for satire—but the chemistry is undeniable and the timing is spot on. Imagine your young teenage daughter and her best friend finishing each other’s sentences, then fast forward 15 years.
Hip Shot: “Pebble-and-Cart Cycle: one-line tragedies”
Pebble-and-Cart Cycle: one-line tragedies
Warehouse – Mainstage
Remaining Performance:
Sunday, July 19 @ 4:15 pm
They say: A woman battles a fly. Father has a horse attack. Brother turns into a goat. The Pebble-and-Cart Cycle unveils a spellbinding journey where folk legend, animal archetype and personal experience weave together to expose the theater of inner conflict.
Chris says:Two thoughts are jostling in my mind for attention. The first is that the Pebble-and-Cart Cycle is easily the best thing I’ve seen in two years of Fringe blogging. Happiness! The second is that there were only 14 people in the audience at the beginning, dwindling to 10 even before the intermission and 6 after the intermission. Despair!
True, there are no casual satisfactions to be gleaned from this work. There is neither comfort in watching a known story, nor ease in grasping a new one. So I understand why the defectors left. The fact that they did speaks volumes, however, about the state of both theater and audiences in the District. This being a city of institutions, we are surrounded by pimped-out art palaces that offer the most run-of-the-mill stuff in the most conventional productions. For heaven’s sake, even Woolly Mammoth–which I like more than any other theater in town–pretends that new equals daring.
Hip Shot: “Lincoln and God”
Lincoln and God
Warehouse – Mainstage
Remaining Performance:
Sunday, July 19th @ 9 pm
They say: Lincoln and God examines our sixteenth President’s conflict with men and God through defeats, triumphs, and tragedies. Lincoln joins no church, but does he hear God in the dialogue and actions and words of friends, colleagues, and enemies?
Chris says: There’s a popular story to the effect that shortly prior to his death, Thoreau was asked if he had made his peace with God. He replied, “I didn’t know we had quarreled.” This anecdote passed through my head as I was watching Lincoln and God, which might easily be renamed Lincoln Not Quarreling with God.
A pervasive assumption dating back to the Romantic era is that conflict is the essence of drama. Hegel deserves much of the credit for this idea. Unlike Aristotle, whose idea of an exemplary play was Oedipus (for argument’s sake, a one-person play), Hegel fancied Antigone, a two-person play: a bitter argument between Creon and Antigone. For good viewing, the current thinking goes, you need two poles, two non-cohering value systems.
Hip Shot: “Murth”
Murth (rehearsal photos)
The Bodega – at The Trading Post
Remaining shows:
Saturday, July 18th @ 10:45 pm
Sunday, July 19th @ 1:45 pm
Thursday, July 23rd @ 5:00 pm
They say: A stripper’s boss, after rescuing her from drug hallucinations caused by a drunk doctor, encounters a cranky Korean maid and a black policeman. Crimes follow, provoked by dialogue sounding ‘like a collaboration between Woody Allen, Tom Stoppard and Chris Rock.’
Chris says: Imagine the following: a stripper dressed like she watches too much “I Dream of Jeannie,” a made-for-daytime-TV doctor, and a country-fried yokel of a strip joint operator. Sprinkle that mental image with assorted weirdos: a pope, a bovine wife, a grating runt of a man scolding your use of language, an Asian domestic who’s really a DEA agent, a cop who’s really a masseur, and so on.
Next, imagine that each of these figures has a distinguishable manner of speaking: The doctor sounds like the voice-over for an old film noir; the yokel sounds like something off Andy Griffith, King of the Hill, or one of the Ernest movies; the grating runt man (technically, “The Spooky Human Dictionary,” henceforth the HD) sounds like an Americanized Stewie Griffin; the Asian domestic lays the me-speaka-you-flied-lice-long-time on thick; the cop, black no less, sounds like a cartoon leprechaun.
Not Even a Hip Shot: ‘Born of a Fairytale’
Born of a Fairytale
The Shop – at Fort Fringe
Remaining performances:
Saturday, July 18th @ 12:45 pm
Sunday, July 19th @ 4:30 pm
They say: A mix of dark fairytales, dance fever and a character caught between reality and fantasy who realizes she doesn’t particularly like either. What happens to happily ever after if the girl grooves her way to rescuing herself?
Chris says: This show wasn’t on my official blogging itinerary, so I’ll keep this brief. This one-woman show is fun and ultra-kinetic: Every imaginable detail of the story that can be turned into motion is turned into motion. There are elements of mime, dance theater, and plain-old groovin’ to the music.
See it if: You like watching Shrek, or aerobics videos.
Skip it if: The analogy of a girl who loses her voice to a woman in a bad relationship (or two, or three) makes you want to switch the channel to Spike.
Hip Shot: “The Fall of the House of Usher”
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Apothecary – at The Trading Post
Remaining performances:
Saturday, July 18th @ 4:30 pm
Wednesday, July 22nd @ 9 pm
Friday, July 24th @ 9:30 pm
They say: Dark musical based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. A poor street musician befriends a musical genius, his beautiful wife, and his brilliant sister. A tragic death and a terrible secret turn their ancient mansion into a tomb.
Chris says: I’d probably not read “The Fall of the House of Usher” since some time before the Walkman came on the market. But the story was tucked away somewhere at the back of my head, and as I was watching this musical version, I kept feeling I was watching a work more inspired by than derived from Poe. So when I got home, I did a quick brush-up. I’m no Poe purist, and I’m not here to judge the play by how it does or doesn’t stray, but let’s take a moment and clarify what’s going on.
Hip-Shot: ‘All That Was Left of Them’
All That Was Left of Them
Goethe Institut
Remaining Performances:
July 11th @ 1 pm
July 11th @ 5:15 pm
July 12th @ 5 pm
They say: A toy soldier yearns for an impossible love. A girl is punished for her vanity. All That Was Left of Them combines the work of Hans Christian Anderson to praise the importance of fairy tales and question the way we tell stories.
Chris says: Sure enough, this show comprises two fairy tales. The first is a doomed Toy Story love affair between a tin soldier and a paper doll (hint: he melts, she burns). The second is a darker cautionary tale for naughty children. A girl who was to bring a loaf of bread home to her mother has instead stepped on it to navigate her way across a mud puddle. This misdeed propels her to the devil’s entrance hall, where she she finds herself entangled and starving in a web as demons taunt her with bread.
The tricky part of adapting a narrative work for the stage is making the “this happened, and then this happened” into action. The cheater’s method is to leave the narration intact. There are moments, especially in the first fairy tale, when one of the actors quotes from the fairy tale while another acts out the scene like a Christmas pantomime.
Fringe Blogger Profile: Chris Swanson
Name: Chris Swanson
Hometown: Dillon, MT. Actually, I grew up just down the street from Fringe impresario Julianne Brienza.
Years in DC: 4
First CapFringe? Nope. Blogged last year too.
Shows I’m Seeing: All That Was Left of Them, The Fall of the House of Usher, Born of a Fairytale, so far…
Random Thing You Might Find Revealing About My Sensibilities: I teach dramatic structure to graduate theater students.
‘Four Rooms Waking’
Four Rooms Waking
Studio Theatre
Remaining performances:
Thursday, July 24 @ 6:00 PM; Saturday, July 26 @ 9:00 PM; Sunday, July 27 @ 6:00 PM
They say: A one-of-a-kind theatrical experience, Four Rooms Waking captures one gripping day in the lives of four sets of unique characters. By turns haunted and hilarious, they will lead you from Algiers to London, New York to Havana – questioning sexuality and nationality, war and liberation. Will love or necessity hold sway?
Chris’s take: One palpable trend in contemporary theater has been the slicing and splicing of multiple narratives. In Arcadia Tom Stoppard cleverly weaves together scenes set in a Derbyshire country manor in 1809 and the present day; in 33 Variations Moisés Kaufman similarly but less cleverly weaves together the life of Beethoven, circa 1819, and a contemporary musicologist’s efforts to unravel the past. In the same vein, Four Rooms Waking tells four stories, each set in a different room at a different time and place: Algiers, 1955; Oxford, 1964; New York City, 1967; and Havana, 1975.
The interspersed short scenes offer glimpses of each of the four narratives, none of which feels fully elaborated. Each story line resembles (but really isn’t) a love story in which a woman desires a man. In Algiers, as the National Liberation Fronts fights to oust the French, an Algerian woman who’s been protecting a wounded French soldier struggles with whether to kill him. In Oxford, an anthropologist dreams of a “birdman,” who embodies her Kenyan lover. In New York City, a closeted lesbian pines for a hometown boyfriend, who unlike her has embraced his homosexuality. In Havana, a woman’s lover comes back from the war in Angola too shaken to readjust. If there’s a thread running through these vignettes it’s the practical impossibility of each relationship.
“Coriolanus”
Coriolanus at Warehouse Theater Next Door
Remaining Performances:
Saturday, 7/12, 2 pm
Sunday, 7/20, 2 pm
Saturday, 7/26, 7:30 pm
They say: “In the Rude Mechanicals’ Coriolanus – Man of the People by William Shakespeare, the seldom-performed play is reinterpreted (and trimmed) for a modern audience into a sharp satire about politics and politicians. No establishment is left unlampooned, from the politicians, lobbyists and media – to the followers they manipulate.”
Chris’s take: In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck derisively labels the amateur actors rehearsing to perform for Theseus “a crew of patches, rude mechanicals,” which is to say a bunch of clownish, ignorant workingmen. The plentiful small theater companies that name themselves the “Rude Mechanicals” probably do so recalling the pleasant mayhem of Pyramus and Thisby, and overlooking the mechanicals’ sheer theatrical ineptitude.
The Laurel-based Rude Mechanicals bill their production of Coriolanus as “A Contemporary Satire by William Shakespeare.” Hmm. The thing about satires is that they ridicule institutions and individuals, and that they’re funny. The impulse behind this production was evidently to use Coriolanus to poke fun at the Bush administration. Thus, the citizens up in arms over corn prices carry placards with suspiciously contemporary slogans such as “No Blood for Corn”; Coriolanus speaks in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner; and naturally there are color-coded threat indicators. Sadly, this is the full extent of the “contemporary satire,” which is neither particularly insightful nor apt.
By inference, the director has come up with one gimmick (set the play in the present day) and in so doing didn’t bother to stage the play in a way that genuinely offers an interpretation of the story. In other words, through thoughtful direction, the production might have conveyed that because they blow with the wind, it’s actually the fickle citizens who are most responsible for the political meltdown, or it might have conveyed that Coriolanus is a man genuinely reluctant to pursue power who finds himself in a situation he could not have imagined, or even that he is genuinely a tyrant who deserves his death.
Instead, what we mostly get is an hour and 20 minutes of actors saying their lines, and making their entrances and exits. There are worse things, but there are better things too.
The acting is uneven. Alan Duda plays Coriolanus with military stoicism (think Vladimir Putin with more hair) but without any enlightening nuance. The finest actor, the one whose words flow trippingly on the tongue, is Mike Galizia as patrician Menenius Agrippa. Some of the actors in lesser roles are genuinely miserable. The staging is extremely minimal, which in itself is not a complaint. What is a complaint–and perhaps not the company’s fault–is that the stage creaks constantly, a palpable distraction.
The production ultimately comes across not as a satire, but as an accidental stage adaptation of a late-night, cable B-movie. There are lots of guys wearing fatigues and berets, explosions (if you can call bursts from a fog machine explosions, that is), guns (plastic, of course, and proportioned for children rather than adult actors), gunfire (recorded sound effects), and cheesy synthesized underscoring. As with the original mechanicals, the effect achieved is something other than the effect intended.
See it if: You are a Shakespeare enthusiast. Productions of Coriolanus just don’t come along every day.
Skip it if: You thought this would be played as satire.
