A theater critic burns through memo pads at a fast clip. Mine get filled up with the stuff you’d imagine they would: bits of dialogue, a lighting cue, dashed-off descriptions of a set or a costume. For me at least, the notes are little more than mnemonic street lamps, each one lighting up a few minutes of the play I just watched. I don’t often write down anything I’d consider real criticism, unless, say, I’m just not buying what a given group of performers is selling and I can’t put my finger on just exactly why until I hit on a word like tentative - that stuff, I’ll write down.

But my notes also contain, ah, other stuff. Lookit: if the bf doesn’t wanna join me when I review something, I tend to go alone. And when I do, I do what everyone who sits alone in a theater has done since Seven Against Thebes was packing them in.

No. Not that. There’s zoning. Also: ew.

No: I eavesdrop the hell out of you.

Here’s some of the pearls of - let’s be generous and call it wisdom - overheard during Fringe.

“No, we’ve never been to Fringe before. We’re from Annandale.”
Matronly sort at Cat-Headed Baby, blithely asserting a cause-and-effect relationship where one doesn’t necessarily exist.

“I dunno. Do they grab you and make you come on stage? I hate that. It’s like, dude, I’m paying you to watch you.”
Skeptical teen perusing fliers at Fort Fringe, expressing his conviction that “audience participation” is oxymoronic in nature.

“…Antonin Scalia’s favorite restaurant…”
I’ve overheard this phrase, or a variation thereof, every time I get within 20 feet of Fort Fringe. I imagine Fringe staffers hear it on the hour. Please stop.

“Did you get that thing where she was in the shower?”
Furrow-browed young woman leaving Born Normal, confessing her slow-on-the-uptakeness in re: one of the show’s more abstract jokes. If you’re reading this: It took me a while to get that, too, but I think she’s talking about sperm. Or crabs, possibly. No, probably sperm.

“Are you seeing the arms on that guy? [Grunt.]”
A slightly tipsy admirer of the male form, shamelessly objectifying one particular Dizzy Miss Lizzie castmember.

“Well, I haven’t had any of my patients die unless it was just their time.”
Nothing to do with Fringe, really, except that we overheard it over a post-Born Normal Guinness at the Fox, and, seriously: WHAT? Listen, Dr. Calvinist: My time, schmy time – I get wheeled into your ER with a sucking chest wound, I need to see a little more hustle from you.

Got any more?

Bee Man
Cole Studio

Remaining Performances:
Sunday, July 20 @4pm
Thursday, July 24 @9pm
Friday, July 25 @9pm
Sunday, July 27 @2pm

They say: “Our food supply depends on bees. In this one-man play, Lorenzo Langstroth - scientist, minister, author, abolitionist, raconteur and manic-depressive - shares his experience of 19th-century life, his observations and love of bees, and insights into the natural and spiritual worlds. His 1851 invention of the modern beehive changed agriculture forever.”

Glen’s take:Let’s get the bona fides out of the way: writer/performer Marc Hoffman is a Director of the Maryland State Beekeepers Association. Okay? The man knows an Apis mellifera from an Apis cerana. That’s probably why Bee Man is at its best in those moments when Hoffman’s expressing Langstroth’s — and presumably his own — enthusiasm and admiration for the li’l buggers. Hoffman seems confident and completely at home discussing the finer points of apiculture, as when he proudly walks the audience through the design and construction of Langstroth patent beehive.

That’s the stuff that takes up most of Act I, and it’s never less than interesting. Acts II and III, however, move away from wide-eyed bee-geekery to concern themselves with Langstroth’s later years, when he was fighting over his patents and his legacy. Hoffman’s less on his game here: he seems always to be searching for his next line, and indicates Langstroth’s emotional difficulties by shouting a bit. The founder of modern apiculture was a man of many facets, and the script duly hits each one — minister, scientist, manic-depressive, etc. — but it does so in a perfunctory, whistle-stop manner that never quite resolves into a three-dimensional picture.

What it feels like, of course, is the stuff of school assemblies and on-the-hour performances at your local science museum. That’s not a dig — as a dutiful profile of an interesting historical figure, Bee Man succeeds. But as a piece of theater — much less fringe theater? Bee Man … is a dutiful profile of an interesting historical figure.

See it if: You were going to anyway, given the subject matter.

Skip it if: You appreciation for the one-man biographical show has been forever tainted by Bob Odenkirk’s Lincoln (”I was born in a log cabin. MADE OF LOGS!”).

Born Normal
The Source

Remaining performances:
Saturday, July 19 @ 6 PM
Sunday, July 20 @ 1 PM
Saturday, July 26 @ 5 PM
Sunday, July 27 6:30 PM

They say: “Her mother has wings; her sister can raise the dead; and her brother is growing increasingly bizarre in his own way. How can Jane keep her family together when she’s not even sure she wants to be a part of it? Who knew being born normal could be so difficult?”

Glen’s take: Born Normal had me worried there for a while. As playwright Stephen Spotswood trotted out his clan of quirk-riddled characters, many of whom possess the kind of gifts that’d earn them AP credits at the Xavier School (wings, ESP, a necromantic touch) I girded myself for that particular species of magical realism that’s more about the magic than the real–theater that concerns itself with nothing but its own overripe and overwrought mythology.

But even as Born Normal’s contrivances pile up, you’ll start to spot signs of promise: Eli Sibley’s patrician bearing, Slice Hicks’ low-key delivery, and – especially – some evocatively staged and downright lovely moments involving those wings. And then, about 20 minutes in, a tonal shift occurs, at which point your can feel the author deciding: Okay, I’ve got enough toys to play with here. From that moment on, Born Normal turns in on itself, but not in the airless, overcooked way that reduces its magical elements to mere cartoons. Instead, Spotswood and director Ryan Whinnem devote themselves to fully imagining this world until it achieves a metaphorical and emotional heft.

That said, the show’s metaphorical elements are awfully on-the-nose, but Spotswood gets a bye because he allows the characters to notice it too. I’m less inclined to forgive the way the show underutilizes a naturalistic actor like Brandon McCoy while overutilizing Laura E. Quenzel’s prolix narrator. And even though Born Normal ends precisely when it needs to, it could stand another cold, appraising edit: I’m not sure the character of Sissy (Rachel Holt) is yet pulling her narrative weight, for one thing, and if a scene between the narrator and her grandmother (Holt again) served some end besides giving Holt a chance to make some funny faces, I confess I missed it.

See it if: Your bookshelf leans more Chris Adrian and Kevin Brockmeier than Clive Cussler and Nicholas Sparks.

Skip it if: In your estimation, the complex psycho-social terrain of the Normal-Child-in-Wacky-Family dynamic has already been mapped, and definitively so, by The Munsters.

The Chalk Boy
Warehouse - Beyond

Remaining Performances:
Thursday, July 17, 6:30pm
Friday, July 18, 9:00pm
Saturday, July 19, 9:00pm
Sunday, July 20, Noon

They say: “Beneath its boring facade a Northwest town hides a nasty secret, and the girls from local high school’s Christian Athletes Club are here to tell you about it. Murder, the occult, algebra - this is a deathly black comedy that punches as hard as your high school bully.”

Glen’s take: The above blurb — and the opening four minutes or so — would seem to augur a campy, over-the-top sendup of high school malaise, but Joshua Conkel’s The Chalk Boy has got more River’s Edge than Heathers in its dramaturgical DNA. And, much as I love me some “School’s-cancelled-today-because-Kurt-and-Ram-killed-themselves-in-a-repressed-homosexual-suicide-pact!” goodness, Conkel’s choice to ground his tale in a grubbier, less outsized reality makes for an admirably layered, thoughtful and slyly funny evening.

As you watch, you get the distinct sense that a different company could take the same script and have a sillier, campier time with it. Conkel’s play is built on the shifting alliances of four high school girls, and it wouldn’t take much to reduce them to types — Bitch, Witch, Jesusfreak, Dyke-in-Training — that would make for fish-in-a-barrel comic fodder. Certainly there are jokey elements (Wiccan ceremonies performed with cake servers and battery-operated candles) aplenty. And who knows: Wednesday night’s premiere was sparsely attended, and I suppose it’s possible that, given a larger crowd and bigger response, the actors might feel compelled to push their performances bigger. But I don’t think so. And I certainly hope not.

At the heart of The Chalk Boy is Jennifer Harder’s Penny, a prematurely weathered young woman who convinces herself she’s in love with a boy who’s gone missing. By imbuing Penny with a soft edge of world-weariness — she’s not so much alienated as she is disappointed — Harder helps keep the production rooted in the specfic; the other actors seem to key off her efforts. Kate Huisentruit is possessed of a killer deadpan, Mary Catherine Donnelly brings something small and true to each of the several roles she assumes, and Marguerite French is careful to supply her angry bitch Trisha with humanizing self-awareness.

Not every element emerges clearly; the sense of foreboding Conkel attempts to create — he wants you to feel the threat hanging over his characters, to sense the Something that waits for them in the darkness at the edge of town. It’s not there yet, but could be, with a bit of massaging. And I can’t shake the impression that Conkel doesn’t really stick the dismount — his ending is more of a stopping — but those are quibbles.

See it if: Um… you have a pulse? Look, I got nothing: Just see it, is all.

Skip it if: You were totally on your high school’s Spirit Week Committee, and Crazy Hat Day? Your idea.

Unintended Consequences: Three One-Act Comedies
Warehouse - Next Door

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 19 @ 8:30pm
Wednesday, July 23 @ 6:30pm
Saturday, July 26 @ 3:30pm

They say: “What the hell were they thinking? The delightfully perplexed characters in this trio of one-acts cope with the unintended consequences that ensue when the INS investigates illegal trafficking in undocumented genies, the Devil issues an RFP for a consultant, and an agenda-less retreat ends improbably, yet inevitably, in romance.”

Glen’s take: The laudable mission statement of the recently formed Senior Moments Theatre Company (”To encourage and support emerging dramatists over 55″) probably had a lot to do with the demographic makeup of Unintended Consequences‘ Sunday afternoon crowd, which, I merely note, skewed a bit more, ah, Applebee’s-five-o’clock-dinner-rush than Fringe audiences generally do.

Look: I get that satire is inherently pushy. It is, after all, just Funny With Something to Prove. But the trick of it — the way you get audiences to swallow your pill — is to spend more time worrying about the Funny than the Something to Prove. Satire goes wrong when its makers are so keen to poke you in the ribs that they neglect to tickle them.

Take the first two playlets in Unintended Consequences, both of which suffer from being overwritten and broadly performed. That, as it turns out, is a near deadly combination, because by insisting so shrilly and laboriously on their central satirical premises (Genies = Illegal Immigrants and Consultants = Satan), both plays reveal how little value they place on things like character, dialogue and recognizable emotion.

But as soon as the third and final one-act starts, something happens. Something surprising, and really kinda great. Even though its satiric premise isn’t particularly fresh (just some familiar pokes at meeting facilitators and org-speak), even though it’s written by the same guy responsible for the genie comedy you sat through earlier, that last play hits you like a revelation, for two reasons: Karen Lange, as a hopeful Arts Administrator, and Washington Improv Theater regular Stuart Scotten, as a hesitant meeting attendee. These two performers concentrate on creating characters — rounded, funny, utterly believable characters — and allow themselves to find the script’s jokes, instead of lunging at them.  Scotten in particular offers a master class in what offhand, unforced comic timing can do for a production; as a result, precisely 33.3% of Unintended Consequences is easily the best thing in Fringe I’ve seen so far.

See if if: You are possessed of both a Zen-like patience and a fondness for jokes about media consultants.

Skip it if: You’d rather catch Scotten at WIT.

Ethan Now
The Universe - Universalist National Memorial Church

Remaining Performances:
Friday, July 18 @ 7pm
Sunday, July 20 @ 12:30pm
Saturday, July 26 @ 3pm
Sunday, July 27 @ 12:30pm

They say: “Ethan Now tells the story of the Lansdown brothers - Ethan, successful investment banker with a smart and beautiful wife, and Bradley, struggling writer who has “never even had a girlfriend.” Brought together at their parent’s [sic] beach house for their father’s funeral, this apparently ideal family proves to be anything but.”

Glen’s take: It’s useful to separate Ethan Now (the written play) from Ethan Now (the Fringe staging) and here’s why:  The play itself? A fairly conventional bit of business in the dysfunctional-WASPy-family mode that doesn’t go particularly Fringey until about six minutes to the end (and even then only kinda-sorta.)

The physical production, on the other hand, is pure Fringe from the get-go, inasmuch as it’s mounted in a sweltering church basement with notably lousy acoustics (seriously: unless the actors face downstage front and shout — something most of this tentative, small-voiced cast is reluctant to do — entire monologues get swallowed up in a din of echoes).

Director/author James L. Beller, Jr. seems to know what he wants to say about the nature of fraternal rivalry and sexual frustration, but he hasn’t yet supplied Ethan Now with enough structure to say it clearly.  As a result, the play hits the same beats repeatedly, a nice, well-acted monologue by the boys’ mother (Susan Holliday) goes on too long, and those last six minutes simply aren’t built strongly enough to support the weight they’re expected to.

See it if: You can bring along headphones and a shotgun mike.

Skip it if: You think sitting in a church basement listening to someone complain about his dysfunctional family sounds too much like an AA meeting.

Revenge of the Cat-Headed Baby and Other True Tales about Life and Death
Cole Studio

Remaining Performances:
Sunday, 7/13, 3pm
Wednesday, 7/16, 6:30pm
Saturday, 7/19, 9pm
Saturday, 7/26, 5pm
Sunday, 7/27, 4pm

They say: “Revenge… uses conversational storytelling as a vehicle for exploring 5 unique viewpoints on life and death. Ride along as we regale you with tales of war, procreation, chainsaws, telenovelas, and of course the Cat-Headed Baby.  This program follows in the fine footsteps of last year’s smash, Chocolate Jesus.”

Glen’s take: The SpeakeasyDC folks know their marketing.  “Washington’s premier storytelling organization” has two shows in Fringe this year, and one of them — the returning Chocolate Jesus at Chief Ike’s — already looks to be selling out all over again.  But before there was word of mouth, there was that kickass title, which you can bet put more than a few curious asses in seats.

We may be looking at Jesus Redux here, if the crowd packed into the teensy Borderstan artist’s studio for Cat-Headed Baby is anything to go by.  More than a few of my fellow fringegoers owned up to being drawn there by the name, and if the show doesn’t exactly deliver on its fanciful titular promise, it does supply a healthy dose of more prosaic — as in factual — pleasures.

Five performers, five true autobiographical tales, told well.  No, not simply told — shaped.  And that’s the key: as each story unfolds, you find yourself noting how well each storyteller directs the flow of the narrative, wrasslin’ it into submission with a gesture, callback, or well-timed pause.  The particular subjects in question (in order: girlhood, war, boyhood, cancer, girlhood again, and birth control) don’t do the experience justice, because the performers aren’t interested in such abstractions — they just wanna tell you a story.  Does the fact that these tales have been so carefully molded occasionally cause them to come off a bit … well, canned?  Is the “my parents say crazy things in funny accents!” school of comedy represented?  And do the performers, in the interest of investing their stories with “heart”, occasionally stray into the decidedly un-Fringey territory of Moral Uplift?  Yes, yes and yes.  But you’ll forgive ‘em.

See it if: Even four years after his death, your heart still bears a Spalding Gray-shaped hole.

Skip it if: You prefer your Fringe fare more in the nihilist/deconstructionist/vivisectionist vein, thank you very much.

With CapFringe ‘08 poised to blanket DC in a fervid haze of creativity, manic energy and dick jokes, let’s throw some love at those who’ll be doing a lot of figurative and literal heavy lifting over the next 18 days: the tech crews.

Fringe’s boundless “Hey-gang-let’s-put-on-a-show-with-dildos!” inventiveness is great, but even the most stripped-down, raw-boned performance requires some tech/design work. During DC Fringe, crews often do that work in unfamiliar venues amid hot, cramped, rats-nibbling-away-at-your-Crocs conditions.

And it must needs be done quickly. Bear in mind that there’s no such thing as Tech Week in Fringe: Groups are generally allotted two hours of tech rehearsal for every hour of total performance time during the festival. If that sounds generous, consider how much of that time gets gobbled up by setting up, testing and breaking down equipment.

In short, the universe conspires to prevent the kind of small, smoothly timed theatrical moments that audiences take for granted in non-Fringe performance. By all rights they shouldn’t happen, and yet they surely will. One of the main things I loved about that pirate queen show last year was the ingeniously economical way it dealt with  technical constraints.

So if you see something during Fringe – a sound, music or lighting cue that works perfectly, a costume that wows, even a bit of stage blocking that speaks volumes – tell us about that moment in the comments.

And if, while out Fringing, you should happen upon some crew member looking particularly harried/sweaty/beset by vermin, buy ‘em a drink.