Headscarf and the Angry Bitch by Zehra Fazal
Warehouse – Next Door

Remaining Performances:
Jul 17th at 8:30 p.m.
Jul 18th at 3:30 p.m.

They say: “Join Zed Headscarf on a tongue-in-cheek romp through faith and growing up Muslim in America. Featuring hits like ‘The Only Thing I’ll Do Five Times a Day is You’ and ‘I Lost My Virginity During Ramadan.’ This beef ain’t halal!”

Mike’s take: The future of American-Islamic relations could hinge on this one-woman show. Before Muslim folk-rocker Zed Headscarf (Zehra Fazal) got involved, America’s most memorable depictions of Islam were a.) Lil Kim sporting a hijab and not much else on the cover of One World and b.) that episode of Southpark wherein the boys travel to Afghanistan to return a mail-order goat to its starving family. (And to kill Osama bin Laden, who, in the words of Cartman, “has a small penis.”) No wonder those pious clerics up and declared America’s objectification of women and obsession with dick jokes as deserving of–dare I say it?–jihad! Zed Headscarf, infidel-licking lesbian though she be, really could change all that.

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Several commenteers (the extra “e” is purposeful, in the vein of “buccaneers” or “racketeers”) have requested a daily open thread for purging purposes.

So…what’s turning you on?  What’s turning you off?  What’s turning you around in circles?  Good God, please, tell us!

I struggle with plays about the Iraq War. On Sunday, I saw Jack Gilhooley’s The Warrior, and it was probably the best Iraq piece I’ve seen. Still, I can’t say I enjoyed it, nor did I find it very dramatically compelling, and as I left the theater I realized that I have never seen what I consider to be a “well-made” or “good” play about the war in Iraq.

Before I go on, let me clarify a few things. As Tammy, the main character and documentary subject of the play, Marietta Elaine Hedges is quite remarkable. She gives an emotionally draining and extremely passionate performance. The play’s content is also dense, well-developed, and rife with conflict. The whole experience is very disturbing, and I left the theater unsettled, as I gather was the playwright’s intention.

But on the whole, I found The Warrior dramatically unsatisfying. I don’t expect to like or enjoy plays about the Iraq War. But I do expect a play to be a play, and in the various Iraq pieces I have seen, there seems to be a trend towards politically virulent, dramatically unsound playwriting.

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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?

Abe Lincoln: A One-Man Show
at Cole Studio

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 19 @ 3pm
Friday, July 25 @ 7pm
Saturday, July 26 @ 8pm

They say: “You probably know that Abe Lincoln was the 16th US president, but did you know he was a joke teller? See Abe tell his amusing anecdotes and relate some of his historical decision-making moments before your very eyes, moments before he leaves for Ford’s Theatre to meet his fate.”

Suzyn’s take: I’m fairly new to theatrical reviewing, but I’m certain it’s never a good thing when a reviewer of a comedy act has “Fozzie Bear” underlined multiple times in her notebook. Regrettably, this is the case for my notes on Scott Renz’s “Abraham Lincoln: A One-Man Show.” From the first minutes of the show, when Renz told a joke about how a lady with a feathered hat who fell down reminded him of a duck because she had “feathers on her head and was down on her behind,” I was exchanging what-the-fuck looks with everyone else in the room under the age of forty.

The old people, however, laughed consistently throughout the entire show.

I was sitting in front of a cranky-sounding couple in perhaps their late fifties. Moments before the show, the husband had looked around the performance space, which is essentially a room with chairs and benches, and observed:

“We could turn our sub-basement into a theatre.”

His wife blandly responded “They’d have a heck of a walk from the metro.”
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Metro: In the State of Mind
The Baldacchino

Remaining Performances:
July 11 @ 9:30 PM
July 12 @ 3:00 PM
July 13 @ 2:00 PM
July 18 @ 7:00 PM
July 19 @ 7:30 PM
July 20 @ 1:00 PM

They say: “poetic non sequiturs …. punctuate illusive conformity …. minimalist … sounds effect … existential expression … on the platform into tangents. Through Dance With Improv Over Music From Concrete To State Of Mind. PERCEPTION WILL TRANSPORT YOU IN YOUR OWN REALITY.”

Chris’s take: In Zurich in 1917, a now-famous ensemble of Dadaists, among them Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara gave a performance in which everything went wrong. The lightening and thunder happened at the wrong times, the backdrops were mixed up, and so forth. Nevertheless the performers “gave the absolute impression that this was a special effect of the production,” and Tzara later wrote that the performance determined the entire direction of the Dada theater. Not bad for a train wreck.

And then there’s METRO: In the State of Mind, playing at the Baldacchino at Fort Fringe through July 20.

Neither a play nor a dance, the performance is an attempt to evoke the DC Metro. As the event begins, performers wind their way into the space: first, a pair of teenaged girls in school uniforms; then a sweating Marine repeating “I see the enemy everywhere” over and over; then a long-haired rock dude, sort of a live-action version of Otto from The Simpsons. The stage gradually accumulates still more characters, including a couple one might at first take for Fringe latecomers awkwardly taking their seats, but who turn out to be part of the show.

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This is really getting out of hand…

This is what happens when people stop being polite, and start getting real. Real Fringey! More tales from the Fringe Confessional…

Was booked for the 5:20 Pabst-and-Popcorn Faustus, but I’ve traded in my tix for the 6 pm Cordelia’s Fool.

Because:

(a) it’s the last performance, and I wanna see it

(b) it gives me an extra 40 minutes to read the new Harry Potter, which I just bought. At an indie bookstore, natch.

Realer than The Real World. Because they’re real.