Remaining Performances:
Friday, July 24 @
5:45 p.m.
Saturday, July 25 @ 11:45 p.m.

They say: “This is play is scar from my head through my heart to my crotch. It’s a Greek chorus wrapped inside a romantic tragedy. There is also some moments of comedy and a compulsion to move via dance yoga and/or tai chi contained within it. A tornado in the rodeo of love and obsession. With meditations on the power of positive thinking. A shogun mystery choreopoem. Unraveling samskaric imprints.” [Note: I typed exactly what was in the Fringe Guide. Exactly.]

Hilary’s take: “I don’t get it,” says K, as D and M (or maybe it was T?) pantomime their pants off, clawing at their waistlines and collars. “I don’t get it!”

That’s exactly how I felt the entire 45 minutes of Stephen Forrest Notes’ “tornado in the rodeo of love and obsession.” I weathered the storm but walked out of Fort Fringe unamazed and confused. I think the gist of the play is this: Boy meets local “it” girl and becomes obsessed with her powerful sexual energy. But this woman is not powerful at all; she is vulnerable, needy even. But she doesn’t need him. Each is searching for a fulfilment the other is painfully ill-equipped to provide.

In the end, I’m not really sure what happens, and I don’t really care. The main problem with Notes’ play is that it’s damn near impossible to figure out who’s who—what distinguishes M from T?—which means I can’t bring myself to care about their thoughts/feelings/actions in each of the convoluted, pseudo-postmodern vignettes. (That might say more about the acting than the writing, but I’ll never know for sure.) And you can forget about context clues—the only props consisted of little more than jester hats, potty-mouthed sock puppets, and an apple.

The play is a clusterfuck of ideas, and perhaps the acting was a little sub par because the performers had to unload so much other garbage (yoga, tai chi, awkward lesbian kisses, wordy monologues…) in addition to the galumphing (lack of) plot points. As the lights went up and AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” (music selection warrants an entirely separate critique) cut through the audience’s baffled silence, I just kept thinking “WTF? W. T. F.”

See it if: Hearing that the playwright studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics sounds like a plus.

Skip it if: Watching someone (maybe D?) devour an apple wayyy too emotionally for five inexplicable minutes—chewing through tears, laughs… pain(?)— isn’t exactly your idea of high art, or good theater. And if while you were reading On The Road you thought to yourself, “Hey, this Kerouac guy could really use fewer drugs and more editing.”

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 25 @ 6:30 p.m.

They say: “Destinies of a European countess and a humble American chambermaid collide at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Swords of steel penetrate gender norms, true identities are freely explored, and one man discovers it is better to receive than to give.”

Hilary’s take: I’m not sure if the Shark Tank Players’ production is the worst play I’ve ever seen or the greatest gender-bending burlesque send-up I’ve ever seen. It’s likely both, and it’s undeniably good, dirty fun.

At the Chicago World’s Fair, BFF’s and fearless shemales Penelope (Lacey Carriage) and Felicity (Goober Cemetery) cross paths (and cross-dress) with Countess Cornelia (the sublime Monti Gilmore), a Dionysian figure the size of Saturn much beloved by her loyal lesbian sex vixens whose breasts she names for the planet’s moons. The Countess knows her way around a sword, and Felicity seeks her fencing expertise to seduce Douglas (Peanut Norway), Penelope’s brother.

But the way to her man’s heart is not so simple. Douglas, whose clingy trousers leave little (okay, all 8 inches) to the imagination, conflates fencing and frottage, humping rather than fighting his opponents. Penelope is more than happy with Douglas’ same-sex distractions, for she harbors a secret love for Felicity (and women, generally). But when the mysterious, intriguing George Sand (Missy Peyton) enters the scene, Douglas and Penelope are smitten; only one gets the girl in the end (literally). It is indeed a story about love, sex, and dominance as the program suggests, replete with sword play both above and below the belt.

Uncorseted is a winding, wildly hilarious ride from lights up to lights down, and all the characters and conflicts are flung to the fore from the get go—after all, the show’s only got 30 minutes to climax. But I would not have protested to spending all night with “nipple consultant” Jetta Bra-man’s handiwork (I’ll never again look at my flesh-colored bras in the same way) and Carriage and Cemetery’s perfect, stiff-as-a-strap-on delivery. The plastic-y fright wigs, the  half-assed transvestism (all men sported at least six o’ clock shadows), the barren staging. It’s an amalgam of great, bad-on-purpose decisions that—much to the cast and crew’s credit—yields Fringe gold.

See it if: You came to Fringe to see something Fringetastic, or at the very least, some boobs. Also, see it if you enjoy swag, i.e. booby cupcakes and “First Family” keychains.

Skip it if: Dangling dildos and lesbian sex vixens don’t tickle your funny bone.

Remaining Performances:
Thursday, July 23 @ 8 p.m.

They say: “Four adventurers step through a wardrobe door and into Narnia, a frozen land enslaved by the White Witch. When almost all hope is lost, the return of the Great Lion, Aslan, signals a great change and sacrifice.”

Hilary’s take: I haven’t the patience for children’s productions.

Looking at the Fringe guide, I wondered how C.S. Lewis’ best known work could be condensed into 42 minutes. Well, the production was actually 30 minutes. And it felt long. But I’m about 15 years older than the target audience and I left my stunt children at home. With no ability to gauge the play’s success on my own, I inferred from the sporadic giggles behind me that the Adventure Theater production had achieved its goal: to entertain the kiddies.

All that said, the performance was technically perfect. Peter and Lucy, firmly in the present, recount the siblings’ past discovery of Narnia, subsequent revolutionary crowning, and 30-year reign. Staging is minimal—just a small wardrobe on wheels and three wintry tapestries speckled with firs, glitter, and Christmas lights—and so is the cast. Kristen Egermeier and Danny Pushkin field the ten or so characters—Susan, the White Witch, and various stone statues and Edmond, Mr. Tumnus, and Aslan, respectively. Egermeier and Pushkin hop around the stage and ramble like authentic children with admirable abandon, taking the antics offstage to whip up some more giggles from the pint-sized patrons. I guess Pushkin sensed the parents and I needed a jolt of enthusiasm, and high-fiving Aslan’s giant plush paw—that which had just slain the wicked witch—was the highlight of my experience.

See it if: You have kids and/or have already seen The Pirates of Penzance.

Skip it if: You don’t have kids.

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 25 @ 11 p.m.
Sunday, July 26 @ 2:15 p.m.

They say: “It’s back! The war on terror takes a hilarious turn as Irish authors from the ages are kidnapped by terrorists of every stripe. Expect no victims in this wicked romp that lampoons beloved writers and hated terrorists, or vice versa.”

Hilary’s take: Perhaps—given this show’s 2003 premiere at the Washington Theater Festival and its 2006 stint at the Warehouse Second Stage—it wouldn’t be fair to the newer, unvetted Fringe acts to hail J.T. Burian Theatricals’ IAHH as the most brilliant (in the ‘cross the pond exclamatory sense) production of 2009′s fest. But in an era held hostage by relics of Dubya’s terror-mongering, “fair” is so last century. Besides, Oscar Wilde (John Morogiello) had me at “I don’t care what you do to me so long as it’s BEAUUUUTIFUL!”

Playwright/actor Morogiello is a comic genius and IAHH the product of his literary sensibilities (okay, nerdiness) and disgusting talent. In less than 90 minutes, Morogiello crystallizes nine of Ireland’s most famous scribblers in caricatures based on astute textual interpretation. Ridiculous though Samuel Beckett or Frank McCourt (both skewered to perfection by Terence Aselford) may be onstage, Morogiello’s subjects are only as absurd as their scripture allows. I really wouldn’t put it past McCourt, author of interminably depressing memoir Angela’s Ashes, to get into a pissing contest with a Somali pirate over whose tortured childhood was indeed more torturous. Sorry Frank, but I think subsisting off half-eaten sandwiches left by documentary film crews beats gobbling garbage and sipping cabbage tea.

Don’t know diddly about James Joyce or Brendan Behan? Unfamiliarity with pub scrawlers is not a huge problem; in the best program I’ve ever read, J. Thaddeus Burian provides a brief, Swiftian rundown of the play’s authors for “the less intelligent members of our audience.” Such patrons may also find enjoyable “International Terrorism: The Game!” located just after the educational bits in the pamphlet. (Hint: The answer is “Power.”)

Sure, the hostage sketch done nine times over may sound like a bore, but Morogiello mixes it up with sub-plots and a recurring tormentor (played gamely by Terence Heffernan). Ninety minutes came and went, and only then did I realize I could hear the music from The Apothecary downstairs in the sweltering Bodega. Nothing else I’ve sampled at Fringe can touch IAHH‘s the trifecta of lacerating wit, flawless delivery, and superb performances from the entire cast (Morogiello’s recurring Yeats was a highlight, as was Lori Boyd’s turn as Lady Gregory). You haven’t Fringed until you’ve seen Wilde clutch his chest at the sight of a “dark, rugged” jihadist bent over in prayer.

See it if: You have $15 and you’d love to know what really kept everyone waiting for Godot.

Skip it if: Belly laughing makes you nauseous.

Remaining Performances:
Wednesday, July 22 @ 10 p.m.
Saturday, July 25 @ 3 p.m.

They say: “Russell Crowe’s double-chin, Houdini Dog, and $12,279 teeth are just a few of the stories in this funny and touching (but not in an icky way) journey through the small moments in life that make up the big moments.”

Hilary’s take: “He’s been telling the same story for 30 years,” says first-time playwright and aspiring funny girl Cigdem (pronounced “Chee-dem”) Oktem of her engineer grandfather. “So, it’s sounding a little repetitve.”

His desire to retread Turkey’s entire economic development timeline with anyone who’ll stay awake aside, he’s pretty much the best grandpa ever. He not only inflated her (feigned) self-confidence to Fringe-a-rific proportions, but the Oktem family patriarch provided his granddaughter’s artistic debut with much of its best material: geriatric bloviations, a noble and inspiring career, and Cigdem’s anecdotal goldmines, aka nutso aunts and uncles.

In her Seinfeldian performance (it’s most definitely a show about nothing and everything), Oktem plucks her best stories from the family tree. The most fruitful of which: her brilliant aunt’s impending husband-cide; her lion-whisperer of a mother’s near death experience; and her Paul Newmanesque uncle’s firearm-stashing and apartment façade-scaling antics.

Other stories, about her stealth Pomeranian (“Houdini Dog”) and her action flick fantasies (one of her favorite films is Wanted), fall flat. Whether trumped by nerves or outsize confidence in the singularity of her rather pedestrian middle class experiences, the pathos necessary to make the unremarkable personal material in How to Eat an Elephant work escaped Oktem’s cultivation. The intimate set — family pictures clinging to the wall and a bottle of Jack waiting next to a worn-in armchair — set the performer’s rigidity in stark relief. Much to my horror, she grasped and consulted her script with each transition; Oktem clearly hasn’t the self-confidence to tell her own story with gusto, or at least without her cheat-sheet.

Still. I don’t know if it was her glitz-tastic club shirt or the result of a play-dream (which occurs when brains clock out mid-performance due to boredom), but I think Oktem’s capable of more than she lets on. Perhaps by next Fringe she’ll have gathered enough constructive criticism and convincing self-confidence for something bigger and better than this Elephant.

See it if: Watching a first-time playwright/performer  figure their shit out in real-time sounds like a Fringe-dream come true.

Skip it if: An hour of enduring stories about YouTube-stalking Russell Crowe and a recently layed-off Oktem’s entire(ly predictable) daytime T.V. schedule seems more like a Friday night pity-date than a night at the theater.

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 11 at 2 p.m.
Saturday, July 18 at 10 pm.
Wednesday, July 22 at 7 p.m.
Friday, July 24 at 7:30 p.m.

They say: “Lock five playwrights in oversized compost bins, and demand plays about the expanding ‘green’ movement. What do you get? Mountains of compost, five smelly playwrights, and a Fringe Festival entry. Come explore the sad truth: It’s Not Easy Being Green.”

Hilary’s take: There are no oversized compost bins or playwrights onstage. In fact, “they say” nothing about the production’s actual content. Here’s what they should’ve said: “Lock a sold out audience in steamy Redrum to absorb one shaky modern dance and four didactic sketches by five (smelly?) playwrights. What do you get? Bludgeoned by morality and a surprise sales pitch in our attempt to expand the ‘green’ movement.”

That said, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend exploring It’s Not Easy Being Green. For the simple truth that it is easy, very easy, to be ‘green’, despite what the forced conflict of each of the four allegories would mislead one to believe (I’m not even gonna touch that modern dance). In Manifesto, playwright Catherine O’Connor conjures an artist (Q. Terah Jackson) who’s written the titular declaration of his desire to destroy all his material goods to “radically recontextualize the consumer experience.” As his gallery-provided assistant films the “art” happening, a homeless man (a superb Slice Hicks) confronts the stripped down artist and his binned $3,000 leather jacket. What ensues is the first of the production’s de rigueur didactic verbal spars, wherein the assumed-to-be-clueless audience is taught to value action over ideation in matters of the planet.

In sketches Driving Green, by Martin Blank, and Use Unknown, by Ali Watson, global warming wreaks havoc on humanity — one couple in a Prius and all of human kind, respectively. But Ben Kingsland’s Trash Talk, about an anthropomorphic garbage can and recycling bin kicked to the curb too early for pick up, was by far the best sketch. In the best performances of the evening, Carolyn Sagatov plays the bad girl trash can to Mary C. Davis’s goody-goody ‘green’ shoes. Shortly after the playground put-downs commence — “You stink!” — the ladies find common ground: a mutual “thing” for Compost Pile. “He’s so down to earth!”

Although the acting was stiff in a few spots, and all the conclusions of the allegories-cum-fables predictable from the moment that rhapsodic street sweeper twirled across the stage (seriously, modern dance = out of my tolerance league), I never once thought about walking out. My mind didn’t even wander to what drinks I’d order afterward, or how my laundry needs doing, &c. Despite this trite treatment of the ‘green’ theme, the the parochial production held my critical attention. Sure, I was stewing over the painfully half-assed conflicts and deus ex machina-like logical conclusions the whole time. But I was mentally engaged nonetheless. And to me, that’s the hallmark of good theater.

See it if: You know nothing about the ‘green’ movement and are “kinda curious, I guess,” you enjoy constant reaffirming of your moral high ground after purchasing a Prius, or you’re looking for a tepid yet socially conscious fringe show to attend with your child.

Skip it if: You don’t enjoy surprise sales pitches, no matter if the outdoorsman-turned-eco building materials expert whips out a blow torch and melts metal in his bare, outstretched hand. (Be forewarned: At the end of each show, Journeymen invite an eco ‘expert’ for a 10-minute lecture on how you can do your part to save the planet. Last night, Keith Ware from Eco-Green Living tried to sell us ceramic insulation, and roofing as thin as a dime!)