Some lovely photos below (and after the jump) courtesy of Aude Guerrucci!

7(x1) Samurai:

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Dig it.

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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!”).

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.

This past Thursday, the stars, architects and friends of Fringe converged under the Baldacchino for an evening of romance and revelry. Watch in awe as a gaggle of performers spill the beans on their upcoming shows.

Cheers!

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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.

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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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.

I just snuck into a rehearsal for METRO: In the State of Mind over in the Baldacchino.  First off, the space looks ultra-colorful and ultra-cool (check out the photos if you don’t believe me).  Only when a helicopter whirls by overhead do you remember you’re in DC.  

METRO is presented by the Pointillism Jazz Consort from Copley, Ohio.  I wondered what exactly pointillism jazz was, and from the bits and pieces I saw, it seems to involve creating a rich, textured soundscape of voices and recordings.  It certainly isn’t singing, but it isn’t Stomp either. One performer makes a “schh” noise at a certain rhythm; another performer syncopates with that; still others chime in behind and above and from the sidelines.  This all happens over a layer of Metro-inspired din: bells, whistles, door-opening announcements, general choo-choo chugging, &tc., &tc.  

The show opens tonight at 7:00 PM, and I imagine this is one of (if not the) first time the cast has gotten to rehearse in the space, if only because the space wasn’t really built until this week.  This is what Fringe is all about: guerilla theater.  Get up there and do it.  Make it work.  Cut that line out if you need to, create that tableau in half the space we rehearsed in, yell that “schh” noise at twice the normal volume to compete with New York Avenue traffic, stop wiping that sweat off your brow and just nail it now because godammit we open in 2 and a half hours.  

And to think, this kind of stuff is going on with 120 productions across the city, if not today, then at some afternoon in the next couple of weeks.  Talk about a state of mind.  

Dear Lovely Fringe People:

Yes, Fringe is all about breaking down walls.

Yes, we stiff-necked media types welcome the opportunity Fringe offers us to escape our sad little cubicles and move among you, the creatively inspired.

Yes, we are delighted to meet you outside Fringe venues, to hear about your show, perhaps even to have a drink with you while discussing your tortured creative process.

But please — and I say “please,” but I mean “ferf*ck’ssakewhatwereyouthinking?” — do not feel the need to call our mobile phones, even if you’ve managed to track down our numbers, and leave voice mails pleading with us to come and see your Fringe productions.

You may be reasonably certain that such appeals will not have the desired effect.

No names will be named here. Unless, um, it happens again.

That is all.