I’ve been planning on writing up an actual reviewlet, but the day has gotten away from me.

So, short version, because they’ve got a perf tonight at 8 (at the Source): It’s worth checking out, especially if you’re into the whole ancient-tales-retold thing.

Some strong movement, some interesting work with shadows and (human-generated) sound, a youngish cast of new faces, and so on.

Adaptation’s OK, too: Nice, incantatory feel to the storytelling. Some of the tellers could maybe use a little more experience with the classics — heightened speech ain’t as easy as it looks, and there’s some furry diction here, the odd bit of tentative delivery there — but on the whole it’s a worthy effort, and smart.

And they’ve got one last performance on Saturday, too.

Photo: Paul Gillis

Prototype 373-G
The Source

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 26 @ 1:00 PM
Sunday, July 27 @ 4:30 PM

They say: “In Polynesian mythology, when people were first created, they were born hatching out of turtle’s eggs … maybe they were right. Prototype 373-G blends humor and magical realism to tell the story of a woman battling extraterrestrials, a series of odd dreams, and the unpredictability of her own heart.”

Trey’s take: How much nonsensical fun was that?

Be warned: Prototype is less a finished play than an excuse for playing around — if I’ve got the story right, it started when some Arena Stage folk, working on that house’s tepid Christmas Carol 1941, realized that they were having fun, and someone’s uncle had a barn called Fringe, and gee, why don’t we put on a show?

Also it’s an excuse for: an unhinged bit of costume design courtesy of The Crafts Action League, an outfit that apparently builds a lot of gaudy stuff for shops around town. One dream sequence alone (check the photo) features a seaweedy mermaid fantasia, a belly-dancer whose look is distinctly chelonian, and a leafy-greens cocktail number that might have been hallucinated by a crash-dieting drag queen midway through an enforced week of Chop’t Salad.

So, why the lettuce wrap? Well, the redhead there (Tara Giordano as struggling stand-up comic) has been brainwashed by the commanding general of a belligerent race of space turtles (Hugh Nees), who plans to use her as a host mother, and –

See, I don’t really need to tell you more, do I? Turtles like lettuce, and this show features marauding alien turtles strong-arming comely Titian-haired maidens into terrestrial sex slavery: ‘Nuff said, book your tickets, do not pass Go.

A rapacious talent agent (Helen Hedman), an impulsive and ultimately unfaithful fiancé (Tim Getman), a recently lobotomized next-door neighbor (Daniel Eichner), and a rapidly growing Trojan Tortoise all play their parts in a loopy, no-development-is-too-wacky script — which, again assuming I’ve got my post-show chatter right, playwright Benjamin Fainstein whipped up specifically for this here ensemble.

The style is episodic, disjointed, and largely surreal, but it’s not that much work to stay on top of things. And what’s surprising, given the show’s loose and lark-y nature, is how much texture — how many tender, spiky, coarse, sweet, and downright charming moments — that ensemble manages to create.

Director Dan Pruksarnukul (he’s casting wallah at Arena) doubtless shares much of the credit, but here’s the real trick: No matter how mad the material gets, he’s got his actors honestly invested in their characters, and they’re paying attention to — and connecting with — each other every moment they’re onstage together.

See it if: You’re attracted to frivolity for its own sake — or you’re an sucker for tight ensemble work.

Skip it if: Whimsy makes you queasy, and no quantity of stagecraft will settle your stomach.

Photos: Paul Gillis

So apparently there’s a big honkin’ protest going on down at the Studio Theatre, where Jerry Springer: The Opera is running as sorta-kinda part of the Fringe. Apparently some religious folk think it’s blasphemous.

(Got a fuzzy cellphone pic from Scot McKenzie, but can’t put it here for arcane technical reasons.)

Now, honestly, people: Of all the stuff at Fringe, you’re going to take exception to a bona fide box office hit that was old news in London three or four years ago? What is up with that?

I mean, not that I want you to go protest over at H Street, but last night I saw a show in which a guy has a poo in his briefcase.

OK, he mimes having a poo in his briefcase. But still.

More later.

UPDATE: Thursday a.m. – So I ambled by Studio to catch the ruckus before the 9 p.m. Fringe show I was planning to see last night. Protesters were still there. Very disciplined bunch. Odd outfits – blazers, with little red-fabric ceremonial wings attached.

Also banners — which you can see here, being rolled up and put away as God washes out the protest with a Noah-size thunderstorm.

And bagpipes. I was fascinated by the presence of the bagpipes. Apparently it’s not a good protest unless there are bagpipes.

Even before I got down there, theatregirl piped up in the comments, saying that the protest group was American Needs Fatima.

Sorta: Technically, it seems America Needs Fatima would seem to be the name of the protest campaign; the group behind it appears to be the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property.

Which may or may not be a wack hard-right Catholic cult. But which certainly, according to its own Web site, runs summer Call to Chivalry camps where “teams of boys [are] pitted against each other in feats of prowess and heroism.”

Also, there seems to be an emphasis on something called “manly piety.” Which, you know, makes a boy like me go all squishy inside.

The American TFP, inevitably, is represented on YouTube, where you can watch an earlier Jerry Springer protest in Cincinnati.

And I must say, based on last night’s jaw-droppingly odd experience, that a good Hail Mary, chanted in a vigorous display of manly piety, makes a better protest refrain than “Hey, hey, ho, ho, [whatever it is] has got to go.”

Before I knew all this, however, I told Studio Theatre boss lady Joy Zinoman — who came over to my spot on the 14th Street sidewalk to share samples of the protesters’ charmingly homophobic leaflets, and to ponder the encoded antifeminism in the “Tradition/Family/Property” slogan on those big red banners — that I suspected she’d arranged the whole business for the sake of publicity.

She was not, it appeared from the expression on her face, particularly amused by this attempt at levity.

So it’s been a while since I did anything other than write up a show, eh? And surely you all, no matter how high-minded your approach to Fringe, expect a certain amount of trash-talking here at Fringe & Purge. 

(I’ve got an excuse, involving my sister, my nephews, and a beach house on the Isle of Palms. Hope y’all had a similarly good week.)

But I’m back in the Fringe groove now, so let’s address that dish deficit. 

Speaking of which, we’ll get all up in Julianne’s business in a minute. But before we throw stones, a note about our own glass house: 

Performance-Us Interruptus - One of Fringe & Purge’s guest bloggers ducked out partway through a show earlier this week, then panned it royally here on the blog. A certain number of the commentariat was outraged — as was one of the show’s cast, who sent me a tart e-mail.

Among the bullet-point complaints (certain paraphrasal liberties have been taken) in that note:

• Ditching mid-show is disrespectful to the cast, the crew, the Fringe Ideal, and anyone who sat dutifully through Hot Feet.
• Other festivals insist that reviewers/judges ”stay until the bitter end of any assigned show — no matter how bad.” 
• Dude complained in his review that the show had no story — but he had left before the story “really had a chance to begin.”
• Y’all should really send somebody else to re-review. And maybe fire the putz.

Now, while we’re sometimes flippant here at Fringe & Purge, we do take this stuff seriously. The City Paper once dismissed a contributing writer who filed a review without telling either her readers or her editor that she’d left the show at intermission. I don’t see why a similar standard ought not to obtain here.

But our contributor did disclose that he’d bailed — disclosed in the review itself, in fact. 

And while I’m open to argument about whether it’s kosher to complain about the weakness of a show’s bones when you haven’t stuck around to assess every last metatarsal, our blogger reports that he stayed for 40 minutes of a show that runs an hour and ten. Which doesn’t strike me as outrageous.

Also: I’m of the belief that respect for the artists or no, it’s within the pale for a critic to leave a show that’s not going well. It’s hard to say when it’s justified, and it’s not something I’d do every week. But bottom line, if you’re convinced that no amount of basting is gonna save a turkey, it’s OK to hit the Eject button. (Not to mix a metaphor, or anything.)

Should our guest blogger not have filed a review at all? Not entirely my call. Blog editor Brian Reed has this to say: 

“I thought it was a very funny and particularly honest review (that he discloses his early departure both earns him all this flack but also espouses a certain integrity), and therefore didn’t worry too much about posting it.  Since then, as you know, several people have responded either with outrage or their own appraisals of the show.”

Indeed: By my estimation, Power House has now gotten more attention on this blog than 9/10ths of the other Fringe shows. And you know what they say about publicity, no-such-thing-as-bad department.

As for the re-reviewing: Without wishing to suggest that the show was owed a second look, I draw your attention to the comments section of the original post. Brett Abelman, who’s one of our other guest bloggers, also took in a performance, and he’s offered up his thoughts in a longish comment.  Which we hope the show’s other partisans will also feel free to do.

One last pair of observations: Dan Owen, the offending guest blogger, strikes me as a smart, funny guy. Works for a big honkin’ international-development organization, has traveled the world, seems like a no-bullshit sort.

But I also know that Shawn Northrip and Shirley Serotsky, the writer and director of Power House, aren’t just f–cking about. They’ve been Fringe heavies since Year One, and between Titus! The Musical, Lunch, The Musical and The Many Adventures of Trixie Tickles, they’ve done their share of entertaining, button-pushing, balls-to-the-wall work.

So I’m inclined to chalk this one up to chacun à son goût – and to point out that taking a chance on shows that may not appeal to your taste is, after all, what Fringe is all about. 

Rehearsalus Interruptus – Heard a hilarious story one night under the Baldacchino: Apparently the Fine Wine Players were rehearsing in a vacant Capitol Hill townhouse, and something about their enthusiasm alarmed the neighbors. Who called the cops. Who — according to the version I heard — arrived with guns drawn, thinking they were responding to a domestic-violence incident.

Fine Wine’s Charlene James-Duguid didn’t mention unholstered weaponry (of any sort) when she called me back to confirm the incident. But she did commend the MPD on their diligence.

And she said that when she explained to the boys in blue that her troops were prepping a show for Fringe, the centurions didn’t miss a beat: “Well, we’ll have to see that,” the officer reportedly said. 

Naked-ness Interruptus - As you may have heard, one early performance of The Naked Party ran a touch long. So long that Fringe staff turned up the house lights and shooed everyone out.

As one Fringe-goer tells us:

“So now you have these actors, on stage, nude. And they immediately break character. The women covered themselves with their hands and then ran for their clothes …. The men stood a little like a “deer in the headlights” …. 

Ironic, that, in a show that uses nudity as a metaphor for vulnerability — and that seems to be at least partly about overcoming shyness.

I got a call that night from an outraged audience member — a DC lawyer friend, whose response was along the lines of: “Dammit, we were just getting to the denouement, and I want to know what happened.” That Fringe-goer, who titled her e-mail “Best Fringe Incident Yet,” alerted CP arts editor Mark Athitakis a couple of days later.

I’d have blogged about all this earlier, but y’know, beach house and all.  

Still, I checked in with Julianne, who pointed out that based on the show’s tech-rehearsal timings, they were on target to run over by about 20 minutes — and that other shows were lined up to load in at that venue.

“Think of the poor venue manager,” Julianne pleaded. “The show after this we would have had to hold, and the one after that. That would have made more people pretty pissed.”

Then she noted that all Fringe fests have similar don’t-blow-your-time-slot rules, chiefly to keep the trains from running completely off the tracks.  And she noted in LARGE letters that that night’s audiences were offered refunds. 

For his part, Naked Party writer-director Jason Schlafstein did a double-back mea culpa with a half twist. 

He and his cast had rehearsed with an invited audience, he said, but never with a real one — and crowd reaction added time. And there was apparently a miscommunication with Fringe: the festival staff had booked x minutes of time, and the Naked partiers were under the impression that they had x-plus-five.

(Forgive the algebra, he was talking fast.)

Schlafstein stresses that he takes full responsibility, that he was mortified, and that he and his gang aren’t sticking any pins in their Julianne doll. 

(Anymore. No, no — I said that, not him.) 

That very night, he says, “I went home and sent out a bunch of cuts to the actors.” Took 10 minutes out of the show. And since then, they’ve been playing to ”pretty much universally positive reviews.” 

And near-sold-out houses, Schlafstein says — so if you’d like to see it, you might want to book your seats now. 

Happy Fringing,

Trey

Overheard at Fort Fringe:

“Not that I’m above picking someone else’s pubes off a urinal, but …”

Wow. So this is still going on, and I’d just like to say: I want some of what he’s smoking.

That is all.

UPDATE, 11:45 p.m. – So just to revisit: I’m not going to write a full review, because I’m not sure quite where to start.  

This was one of the most out-there things I’ve seen yet at Fringe; can’t say it was good, not sure I want to say it was bad, exactly. (It had the distinct whiff of the Radical Faerie about it, and everybody needs a little Faerie dust once in a while.) So let’s leave it at mad — and perhaps spectacularly ill-advised, in a town as buttoned-up as this one. 

Of the 18 audience members who came, 12 of us survived until the end. Which was convenient, because it meant no one was left out when lead performer Huilo Marvavilla produced a dozen yellow roses and went about bestowing them upon the patrons.

The projections were intriguingly psychedelic, the soundscape much the same; the puppets, whether smallish or enormous, were wonderfully well-crafted.

But the puppetry itself was amateurish and unfocused, the dancing likewise, and the whole thing thoroughly incoherent. Act 2, an improvised and largely undecipherable puppet conversation titled “Tea With Duality,” was possibly the single most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever seen on a stage.

Finally, if I were called upon to offer one technical suggestion, it would be this: If you know that, during the course of your trippy hourlong multimedia paean to peace, you will be donning a giant papier-mache puppet-head and dancing about the darkened performance space, you might think twice about building a spider-web of purple yarn throughout said space before the puppet-head dance.

That way, there will be less stumbling.

Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s Roadside Revue: The Oresteia
The Baldacchino at Fort Fringe

Remaining Performances:
Thursday, July 24 @ 6:30 PM
Friday, July 25 @ 7:00 PM
Saturday, July 26 @ 2:00 PM

They say: “If the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus had gone on tour with Led Zeppelin, Woody Guthrie and a carnie troup, this is what he would have written. A tale of blood, guts and vengeance, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, re-charged. Rowdy, raucous, loud and literate: Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s Roadside Revue presents The Oresteia.”

Trey’s take: Pretty much as advertised: Mostly raucous, intermittently musical, almost always fun. (And I’m on record as believing that brand-new Oresteia adaptations aren’t strictly necessary, so from me, “fun” is saying something.)

I had my doubts, too: Could the Revue crew really get through all three of the House of Atreus plays in the advertised 70 minutes? Turns out I’d underestimated the summarizing power of, for instance, the tart shorthand with which a vengeful Elektra, plotting the death of her marricide mother Clytaemnestra, sums up her thoughts about the long-banished brother she hopes will return to deliver the vengeful blow: “I hope he’s not a pussy.”

Also efficient: The stained-glass bluegrass choral number in which Elektra and her fundamentalist libation bearers pray piously for “the death of that vile whore.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The Sticking Place
The Shop at Fort Fringe

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 19 @ 9:00 PM
Thursday, July 24 @ 8:00 PM
Saturday, July 26 @ 3:00 PM

They say: “The DC News career ladder has quite a few rotten rungs! The Sticking Place tells the story of young professionals sucked into this seedy underbelly of the Capital City. Bloodplay, thrill killing, twisted sexual politics, misfits and jerks. If we don’t disgust you, it’s not for lack of trying!”

Trey’s take: Try harder. With the exception of a few glimmers of wit — and what’s probably the best use of chitlins I’ve seen on a DC stage — this Grand Guignol-inspired black comedy feels like the sort of thing a bunch of Saturday Night Live B-listers might whip up for the company holiday party: a decent germ of an idea, underdeveloped and overplayed.

A curtain-raising video montage (quick-cut images of everything from surgery to S&M to humping monkeys) promises an adventurous evening, and as things progress a few tartly phrased silent-movie scene titles serve up a laugh or two.

But mostly, from its context-setting opening monologue (involving the longest TV-news stand-up in recorded history) to its unsurprising final twist (suggested subtitle: “The Revenge of Catherine Tramell”), Molotov Theatre’s tatty little would-be shocker strikes false note after false note. (D.C. bars close at 2 a.m. on weekends? A sex-and-cutting fad among area hipsters is a story an ambitious TV hairdo complains about having to cover?) In a genre whose shocking, titillating pleasures are supposedly rooted in a commitment to realism, that’s kind of a problem.

More disappointing: That a nominally ballsy young cast and creative team thinks it’ll earn a laugh with a bit of accent-mocking in an Asian-takeout scene. And that a Fringe audience doesn’t get the reference when a solo-on-Friday twentysomething, having just been hung up on by said accent, notes this truism: “I’ve officially hit bottom. I’ve been rejected by Yum’s.”

See it if: Your torn-from-the-sensationalized-headlines needs are too urgent for Law & Order: SVU to satisfy.

Skip it if: You’d hate to defile your fond memories of Cherry Red.

Signor Deluso and The Women
The Warehouse – Mainstage

Remaining Performances:
Sunday, July 13 @ 5:30 PM
Saturday, July 19 @ midnight (canceled)
Saturday, July 26 @ 9 PM
Sunday, July 27 @ 6:30 PM

They say: “Presenting Opera Alterna, a new DC opera company dedicated to creating dynamic, provocative opera performances, brings two contemporary mini-operas exploring classic themes of love, relationships and miscommunication. Signor Deluso is a comedy based on Moliere’s Sganarelle & The Women, a surrealist look at the problems between mother, son, and his wife.”

Trey’s take: Good for Opera Alterna, a gaggle of young D.C.-area singers who take their stuff — but not themselves — too seriously. And bravo for whoever picked the repertoire: two brisk little shorts from a New York composer who was all the rage until the ’70s, then suddenly fell out of favor — and moved to Hollywood, where he helped score American Beauty and The Road to Perdition, among other films.

The first mini-opera is the more challenging — not atonal, but dissonant, it’s set in the afterlife and concerned with a mother and a wife warring eternally over the man who’s all they have in common. But it clocks in at a skinny 10 minutes or so, and its heavily Freudian overtones are familiar enough that it needn’t frighten any but the most hardened operaphobes.

Signor Deluso, a slightly more substantial one-act based on an early Moliere comedy, is decidedly more accessible: a jealous wife, an outraged but cowardly husband, a dopey ingénue who (like the husband) leaps to dubious conclusions, and a saucy maid to set everyone straight at last — you know the genre.

It’s all creditably sung and amusingly staged, and everyone’s doing their best — down to the projected surtitles, even though it’s all sung in English — to make it as unthreatening as a Friday night at the multiplex. And at $15, it’s a fair sight cheaper than a night out with the WNO.

See it if: You think it’s good that this year’s Fringe lineup seems a little more diverse, discipline-wise.

Skip it if: You sprout hives at the sound of young lovers warbling — however sweetly — about their passion.

7(x1) Samurai
The Shop at Fort Fringe

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 19 @ 8 PM
Sunday, July 20 @ 2:15 PM
Thursday, July 24 @ 10 PM
Saturday, July 26 @ 1 PM
Sunday, July 27 @ 7 PM

They say: “Kurosawa’s epic tale of victimized peasants, marauding bandits, and samurai warriors – retold at breakneck pace, through movement, by one exhausted and ridiculous actor. With accompanying gibberish and vocal sound effects.”

Trey’s take: Best 45 minutes of my Fringe so far. Don’t be intimidated by the Kurosawa name-check — or by the fact that this guy’s a highly trained mime.

Solo artist David Gaines tarts up the tale of The Seven Samurai with decidedly American pop-culture tropes ranging from action-flick fight sequences to Looney Tunes cartoons — I think there’s even a nod in the direction of the Samurai homage The Magnificent Seven — using those instantly recognizable vocabularies to help tell the story almost entirely without words.

And Gaines is as deft as anyone I’ve ever seen at the efficient definition of character: A gesture, a posture, a shambling shrug, or a katana-sheathing shhhhwwwt sound, and you see the archer, the sleepy swordsman, the giant or the klutzy apprentice samurai. By the time the show culminates in an epic one-man rendition of a full-tilt defend-the-village free-for-all, the illusion is total: One guy, a couple of masks, and a white backdrop, and a roiling battle against the landscape of feudal Japan has unfolded in your mind’s eye.

See it if: You grok that, far from being an outdated discipline to sneer at, the rich nonverbal language that is mime informs contemporary entertainments from Broadway’s Lion King to Pixar’s Wall-E.

Skip it if: You’ve got better things to do than be charmed by a witty concept and a first-rate performer.