Actually, as I write this, it’s looking more like the Apocalypse.  Monster thunderstorm, lightning over the Baldacchino, etc.

So, we’re winding down, eh?  Which seems like a good time to start asking big-picture questions.
So tell us:

How did Fringe — not the shows, but the festival itself — work for you as an audience member this year? As an artist?

What are your thoughts on the venues? On the schedule?

On the artists who participated, and on those who didn’t?

On the Baldacchino, and the bar staff, and the dreaded Button?

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.

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.

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.

Curtain time is drawing nearer and nearer, and you can smell the excitement (and stress) here at Fort Fringe.  Or maybe that’s just the faint odor of parmesan cheese that still lingers like an olfactory ghost in the corridors and kitchens of this former Italian restaurant.  Either way, I have to say it’s kind of appetizing.

In any case, here are some photos.  The highly-hyped Baldacchino (a colorful reinterpretation of fixtures like this one at the Vatican): 

And the inside:

And the retro-red box office:

And the rat traps, all in a row: 

Check out Marc Fisher’s insightful piece on DC Fringe in Sunday’s Post.  It’s about the banal, nitty-gritty obstacles–and, on the flip side, the simple triumphs–that are an inevitable part of mounting a festival like this.  It’ll make you glad that you don’t have Julianne Brienza’s job.  Give me rats over fire inspectors any day.