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.

Kascer strikes me as a first-rate actress, highly believable, linguistically and otherwise, as a British woman of another era; and entertainingly quirky as not just Patty but a stray cast of the people who pop in and out of her story (Patty’s landlord, her boyfriend, a TV producer, etc.).  Kascer is less impressive as a storyteller.  The vignettes based on Lessing feel like paragraphs excerpted from a book without enough context to really make sense. The tale of Pakrat Patty doesn’t go far from where it starts. Either the story should take us somewhere (Patty throws away all her junk, marries her boyfriend, and lives happily ever after). Or, if this is in essence a tale of existential stuckness, then the narrative and performance should make that apparent.

See it if: You enjoy watching a talented actress act.

Skip it if: You go for plays over monologues and/or performance art.

Venue: The Mountain, Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church

Remaining Performances:

Friday, July 23, 8 p.m.
Saturday, July 24, 3 p.m.

They say: “Gilbert’s precursor to Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest, an entanglement of engagements, inheritance stipulations, and Scottish/English class dichotomy. This farcical comedy follows the shameless flirtations of a cad, and the train wrecks that both cause and follow them.”

Chris’s take: Just so we’re clear, the first thing you might want to know about the Victorian Lyric Opera Company’s production of Engaged is that it is not an opera but a straight play.  Written in 1877, Engaged was a comic hit by W.S. Gilbert, the wordsmith of Gilbert and Sullivan. As such it has all the elements of a Victorian light opera except music.

The plot centers on Cheviot Hill, a young man of property, who somehow manages to fall rapturously in love with every woman he meets. The comic upshot of this is that he finds himself simultaneously engaged to three women: fiery Belinda, who not-so-incidentally is also engaged to Cheviot’s frenemy Belvawney; simpering Minnie Symperson, Cheviot’s cousin; and a Scottish lassie named Maggie. The trouble is that under a peculiar Scottish legality, he may or may not have unwittingly married Belinda.

As is the case in most comedies, there’s the sense that in the end Jack will have Jill, though it is unclear until nearly the very end which Jack will have which Jill. Bride-in-legal-limbo Belinda just happens to be a dear friend of Minnie, and while they are waiting, the two of them let themselves be entertained by Belvawney, who declares his passionate love for the woman who doesn’t end up married to Cheviot, whichever she may be.

The production is by-the-book, with few overt signs of directorial imprint. This, and the sheer stripped-down nature of all Fringe shows, puts attention on the performances. The one to watch is David Dubov at Cheviot. There’s a bit of the young Gene Wilder in his performance, which is all about the eyes, the eyebrows, and the folds at the edge of his mouth—all indicators of his own perplexity at the situation in which he finds himself.

See it if: You enjoy works by Gilbert and Sullivan, Oscar Wilde, or Eugene Scribe.

Skip it if: You expect the fully fleshed-out Victorian atmospherics that the Shakespeare Theatre Company would lend to a play of this genre.

Goethe Institut Gallery, 812 7th St. NW

Remaining Performances:

Tuesday, July 20th, 8:30 p.m.
Wednesday, July 21st, 10 p.m.
Saturday, July 24th, 10 p.m.
Sunday, July 25th, 3:30 p.m.

They say: “A pitch-black comedy that asks: “In a world where everyone is clamoring to end it all, why bother living?”

Chris’s take: At its simplest, 7 Lessons on Suicide is about a man who intercedes after he learns (through a suicide note delivered too soon) that his former long-term girlfriend is about to kill herself.  Stanley locates Hannah at a party thrown by a group of soon-to-be suicides, but when he intervenes the hosts tie him to a chair to prevent his prevention.  The premise is clever, and surprisingly humorous given that the number of living characters dwindles as the party progresses.

The suicidal confederates are a mismatched bunch, comprised of a woman who has gone through breast cancer (she seems almost normal), a woefully awkward postal employee (he makes Cliff Clavin on Cheers look normal), and crazy cat ladies Bea and Eunie (they have chosen suicide because their beloved feline has disappeared).

Stanley is our surrogate in this odd society, by all appearances a normal guy whose instinct is to try to talk Hannah down. That he does, but Hannah’s motivations to kill herself are obscure, and it is difficult to follow what logic makes her change course.

All in all, the premise of 7 Lessons is more interesting than the play itself. It has clever moments — Stanley pulling a gun on Hannah to prevent her suicide — but too few.  The tone is odd and sardonic, as when the mailman imagines his own bizarre immolation on a post office conveyor belt. The play, like so many of its characters, comes to an inexplicable end: The denouement simply doesn’t add up in light of what we know about the characters.

See it if: You like your humor dark.

Skip it if: You think you might want to kill yourself.

Venue: The Mountain – at Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church

Remaining Performances:

Tuesday, July 20th 8 p.m.
Friday, July 23rd 6 p.m.

They say: “Think numbers are only useful to balance your checkbook? Join Becca, a junior baker facing a dreaded math test, on a musical and visual romp through history, nature and art, during which Pi teaches her the value of numbers.”

Chris’s take: Becca, the pony-tailed protagonist of Cookin’ Up Numbers, opens the play with Barbie’s lament: “Math is hard!”  She is making a batch of chocolate chip cookies, and needs to measure 3/4 cup of sugar, a task that flummoxes her.  Ah-ha, I think, we shall learn how to use fractions.

Well, no.  We shall not learn anything about fractions from this play.  We shall learn no math at all.  Instead, it turns out, what we shall learn about is the history of mathematics.  There’s a sequence about the evolution of written numbers (“From the alpha through iota / that’s how the Greeks would know ya”), a sequence on the Fibonacci Sequence, and so on.  It’s interesting, but esoteric.  Seriously, a children’s play about base-2?!

I don’t want to be hard on a well-produced performance meant for an audience of children, especially one  that clocks in at a very reasonable 45 minutes.  But I can’t help thinking that this performance is pedagogically off-the-mark.  If the goal is to make a kid see that math is fun and practical, then don’t start start with pi (which is high school-level math, as I recall) and don’t waste time explaining that the bi- in bicycle and binary is Greek. (Incidentally, it’s Latin.)

The audience I was part of was overwhelmingly adult, and unfortunately that was as it should be.  The talking numbers, and the “pi” man wearing a pie as a hat are aimed at the Sesame Street demographic, but the content would all be better suited to an Elderhostel seminar.

See it if: You are a vindictive math nerd parent.

Skip it if: You are that parent’s child.

The Shop at Fort Fringe — 607 New York Avenue NW

Remaining Performance:

Thursday, July 22 at 9:15 p.m.

They say: “Abused kids are trapped between the courts and home. Eight actors think they’re exploring the subject, but this experimental theatre project is about to go terribly wrong. Case 22 is a dark farce that asks questions only you can answer.”

Chris’s take: Some years ago (circa 300 B.C.), a Roman actor named Genesius was performing before emperor Diocletian in the role of a Christian. During the performance, Genesius beheld angels, baptized himself, and became the thing he had been performing. Diocletian saw to the prompt execution of Genesius, who went on to become the patron saint of actors. The great Spanish playwright Lope de Vega dramatizes the story in the superb baroque drama Acting is Believing, and the less-great French playwright Rotrou does the same in a worthy but less memorable neoclassical play.

Several centuries later Jean Genet picks up the theme of characters who are transformed into the thing they perform, most notably in The Balcony. In turn, Jean-Paul Sartre writes a book on Genet entitled Saint Genet, a pun on “Saint Genest” (French for “Saint Genesius”).

The premise of Case 22 is that a group of actors are improvising and rehearsing the story of an abused child, and her lack of good legal options. A replacement actor- -called on to fill in after the cast took their roles a bit too seriously and mishandled the previous child actor — has her Genesius moment standing as an abuse victim before a judge. Deprived of all good recourses within the child protection system, a friend advises her to slit her writst — not enough to die, just enough to make it into the mental health system where she will be safe.  She slices herself and slumps to the ground, while the other actors marvel at her Method acting and commitment to the role.  Is the actress putting on an act, or killing herself on-stage?

The answer, of course, is that we the audience are watching an actress play an actress pretending to have committed herself so deeply to her character that she is actually killing herself. This is community theater, and the line between reality and fiction is as not delicately difficult to make out as it is in Lope or Genet.

The intellectually surprising moment of this performance came–by accident, I think–after the curtain call. The actress Diane El-Shafey (the “social worker”) called the other actors back, announced that it is another cast member’s birthday, and asked everyone to sing “Happy Birthday” to her. Here, suddenly, was the ambiguity the play had lacked. Was this the reality of an impromptu birthday celebration, or the fiction of one, cleverly juxtaposing the morbid final scene? I’m going to guess the former, but Brecht would love the latter.

So, note to director: Keep the post-show “Happy Birthday.”

See it if: You take a socially conscious interest in the child welfare system.

Skip it if: You like your metatheater a bit more transcendent.

Dorks on the Loose: Facey Facey Face Face

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.

Their comedy sketches have one foot in Dumb and Dumber dumbness, and one foot in brainy postmodern high jinks.  In the first sketch, Phaea and Becca are a ballerina and her instructor, each unable to stop making silly faces when they concentrate.  In the next, they’re hammy wedding planners strutting to demonstrate how not to walk as a bride.  Those and other sketches are silly for the joy of silliness.   Others could be riffs on Gödel, Escher, Bach: In an Oprah or Ellen style interview, they interview each other about the interview they’re having, asking at one point, “What are some of your favorite memories of this interview?”  It’s riotous, but it’s highbrow.

It’s amazing how much mileage they get out of saying all the same things at pretty much the same time.  In one sketch, two teenage girls scream giddily in response to everything one of them says.  They open the imaginary door.  “Are you a Mormon?”    “Are you a Mormon?”   (Squeals.)  “Are you Mitt Romney?” “Are you Mitt Romney?”  (Squeals.)   If they had poor timing this would be unbearable, but they have great timing and it’s a joy.

The act is confident without being polished.  It’s not improv, but they roll with the punches when they realize they’ve come out with the wrong prop, when one of them slips on the wet stage (there was a tremendous torrent outside the tent during the performance I saw), or when the Bachelorette Helper Robot has a cold cream malfunction.  They’re having fun and getting a kick out of themselves.

See it if:  You like the idea of SNL but wish it were funny.

Skip it if:   The idea of sitting in a tent  while drinking beer laughing turns you off.

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.

There are production values, and there are the productions I value. In this town, the production values are ample, but it’s unusual for work like this to catch my imagination.

The Pebble-and-Cart Cycle tells (I use that term loosely) three stories, each, as best I can tell, derived from Russian folklore. The first of these–”Moocha: I have a fly on my plate”–is essentially a video installation that sets the tone for the entire cycle. We see a woman at a table–think Christ at the last supper attended by none of the apostles. She swills her wine, swatting a fly with her napkin. The table shakes. The image comes apart.

The second is “Horse: I have my heart in front of me.” This segment’s more intelligible than the first, with the stage bookended by a grandfatherly man and a grandmotherly woman reading a fairy tale from oversized volumes. In the story, there’s a man, his daughter, and a horse. The daughter promises to marry the horse if he will bring the father home, but after the horse obliges, the father kills him with an arrow.

The third story, “Goat: I cannot get into my own shoe,” in one sense tells another fairy tale, but in another discusses the psychology of the difficulty of conceiving.

Does it all make sense? No. Cornell boxes don’t make sense either, but I can stare at them happily for hours.

What makes this play is not that its meanings are explicit–they aren’t–but that absolutely every detail is controlled and deliberate. In the third segment, a man sits slightly to one side, decked out in a regal ceremonial sash. He doesn’t have lines, but even seated and stationary, he’s an active piece of the action because every smile, every glance, every rhythm is intended. Later he dons goat ears. I don’t know quite what that means, but that’s not the point. I buy it because it’s a concrete choice. As David Lynch would say, there’s a difference between mystery and confusion.

The production’s complex imagery feels akin to an artful nightmare. Imagine Yul Brynner wrapped in a horse’s hide, or personified Death revealing its own pregnant belly, embroidered to display the female reproductive system. I hesitate to use the term “surrealism” to describe this play, but at its core, surrealism is about objects turning into other objects, and this performance is full of such transformations.

The idea of a fringe is to make a space for that which lies outside of the theatrical mainstream. This is exactly the sort of work for which the Capital Fringe Festival exists, and it puzzles the heck out of me that there seems to be no audience for this show, no choir for me to preach to.

See it if: You think Broadway is a great way to get to Canal Street.

Skip it if: You think Broadway is the Great White Way.

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.

Lincoln, this play leads me to think, was a calm and thoughtful soul who spent a fair portion of his time in conversation with Rev. Gurley of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church.  As staged, they don’t agree on all matters–the clergyman doesn’t understand why the president does want Southerners to go to church but doesn’t want Bibles to reach rebel soldiers–but there’s not much disagreement here.  One man offers prayers; the other welcomes them.

The history of the Civil War era being so permeated with conflict, it’s amazing to me that playwright Anthony E. Gallo would choose such static material.  He has used history as his framework, selecting and depicting episodes from the first inauguration to the assassination.  He has not, however, captured the drama of the age.

Though it’s not billed as such, this is a staged reading under the thin guise of being a radio drama.  Come with simple expectations.

See it if: You can’t get enough of Lincoln.

Skip it if: You like your fringe funky.

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.

But now imagine that they all sound exactly the same in a writing sense, so that if you read the words on the page the only voice you’d get is the author’s.  Imagine these figures dotting their long speeches with vaguely clever but mostly ill-conceived one-liners.  “A bod up to here and a face only a muslim could love.”  “Embrace it as a mother embraces a lactose-intolerant baby.”  “There’s nothing wrong with you that suicide wouldn’t cure.”  “You’re duller than a first lady memoir.” “Gnomes escape me but I never escape a fez.” “See you later cockulator. / In a while pedophile.”  “When is this bard of Avon calling?”

Now that you’ve imagined all that, you don’t need to go see it.

There’s an approach to play analysis whereby you start at the end and work to the front to see what sets what in motion.  Let’s try.  At the end, the doctor’s been shot by his friend, the masseur dressed as a cop.  The masseur shot him because he wants the Human Dictionary’s bag of money.  There’s a bag of money because, um, something about drugs.  (The doctor’s name is Zedrine, first name Ben.  Get it?  Haha. Groan.)  And the DEA agent is posing as the HD’s domestic because, um, again something about drugs.  We’re in the HD’s apartment because–I don’t know, but it probably has something to do with stripper’s trance, and the stripper was in a trance because, well duh, the doctor drugged her.  Oh my goodness, this play makes no sense.

Considering that the story begins with a stripper and a john (the doctor), it’s a bit of a puzzle that the most intelligible and problematic themes of the play have to do with race.  The HD has taught his Asian domestic that the polite way to say hello is “It would behoove me to be receptive to your penis,” and gives his address as “Darkytown.”  There’s a lame routine between the black cop/masseur whose name is Rochester, and Benjamin Zedrine, i.e. Mr. Benny.  None of this makes enough sense to bother taking offense, but I infer that the author was looking for some thin ice to skate on.

Whoever wrote this—whoever “Hiawatha Lopez” really is—he, she, or it has a sort of mad talent for the odd twist of language and logic that you might expect from a Shakespearean fool.  The catch is that you wouldn’t want the fool writing the whole play, and you wouldn’t want to listen to no voice but the fool’s for two hours.

See it if: You enjoy Stoppardian wordplay, but will settle for worse.

Skip it it: You can.

Born of a Fairytale

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.