“Art answers the questions our hearts pose — and not always in ways our minds understand.”

It was solo performer Annie Houston who offered up that efficiently lyrical observation at the Warehouse Theater, sometime after 9:30 last night, in the waning hours of this year’s Capital Fringe Festival. Which made that deft little meditation on art and the heart one of the last thoughts I heard at this year’s Fringe.

And that line — from Thicker than Water, the moving autobiographical show Houston created with director Steven Scott Mazzola — made an apt shorthand summary, too, for a festival that served up everything from thrill killers, zombie rockers, and marauding space tortoises to chamber opera, classical dance, and old-school silent clowning.

Served it up to a bigger audience than ever, too. Fringe boss Julianne Brienza reports that this year’s festival moved 21,025 tickets — up a little more than 10 percent from last year, when circa 19,000 butts reportedly found their way into seats at Fringe venues across town.

(Also sold this year: precisely 10,000 units of the Fringe Button You Loved to Hate — about which more later.)

Prize Performances

As for the art? Well, Fringe audiences have spoken, voting for Ethan Now as best drama, the zombie-rock shocker Diamond Dead as best musical, and David Gaines’s sublime 7(x1) Samurai as best solo performance.

More Pick of the Fringe results, which got re-announced Sunday night at the Baldacchino following a sparsely attended Saturday-evening ceremony:

• Best Comedy - Dr. Serenity Hawkfire’s Beyond Being Workshop, a New Age/self-help parody
• Best Dance - The Fiddler Ghost, a folksy Celtic fairytale involving puppets and step dance
• Best Experimental Show - Crashing Home, the jazzy multidisciplinary show from the WEERD Sisters

For best overall show — much to my personal humiliation — Fringe-goers picked Molotov Theater’s messy I’ll-cut-you dramedy The Sticking Place. (So much for, y’know, critical authority.)

Much to the shock of experienced handicappers, Fringe Fanatic honors went not to spreadsheet-and-walking-shoes guru Alan King, but to one Mike Riley, who apparently saw 47 Fringe shows. To which I can say only: You, sir, are a better man than I.

The Director’s Award, bestowed by Fringe staff, went to Sue Jin Song’s rapturously reviewed Children of Medea. That prize — given, Brienza says, to an artist who’s taken artistic risks, found creative marketing strategies, and communicated honestly with the festival and with audience about self and show — comes with free registration for next year’s festival, a free ad in the Washington City Paper, and a year’s membership in the Actors Center.

Bite My Button

Now, about those buttons: If you’ve somehow forgotten, they were an innovation this year — a mandatory innovation, required (even for ticketholders and artists) to gain entry at any Fringe venue.

Not everyone likes change, apparently. Certainly not everyone likes to be charged $5 to experience change: Button-bitching, which got an early tongue-in-cheek start (not least on this blog), turned into a full-fledged phenomenon by the height of Fringe.

And not everyone was mollified by the dining-and-drinking discounts Brienza kept reminding the disgruntled masses about: One ticket-seller at last night’s closing party regaled her table with the tale of a patron who (perhaps under the influence of Weldon’s First Law of Fringegoing*) observed that “Our boys are fighting in Iraq to defend democracy, and you’re telling me I have to buy a button? This is not an option?”

On the other hand: 10,000 buttons sold, Brienza points out, translates to $249.00 — over and above ticket revenue — in the pockets of each and every act that performed in a Fringe-run venue this year. Whether that’ll translate into less bitching next year? Anybody’s guess.

Looking Ahead

Meantime, Brienza and her crew are laying plans — for ongoing monthly Fringe Factory workshops, for a possible Halloween shindig in the still-grubby bowels of Fort Fringe (where the recently signed lease runs through late 2009), and for at least one production in The Shop (the Fringe-built black-box space that will continue to operate behind the Fringe offices at 6th and New York).

Watch for new ideas, new initiatives, even new Fringe board members: a formal vote is pending, but word is that developer and Fringe landlord Doug Jemal has expressed interest in signing on.

We here at Fringe & Purge may be dropping in on those workshops from time to time, so keep an eye out for us. And for the next few days we’ll be adding more photos, courtesy of the indefatigable Paul Gillis and Bob Morrison. (Thanks for helping make us look pretty, guys.)

And of course we’ll be back with you for next year’s festival, which runs July 9 to July 26, 2009. That’s right, another three weekends at Fort Fringe, another 100-plus shows, another crop of guest bloggers.

Better start those spreadsheets now.

*Weldon’s First Law of Fringegoing: “Fringe audiences, on average, have a higher blood-alcohol content than most.” Back to story.

[eureka]
H Street Playhouse

Remaining Performances:

Friday, July 25 @ 11:30 PM
Saturday, July 26 @ 3 PM
Sunday, July 27 @ 7 PM

They say: “Albert is so damn frustrated he can’t even talk about it. But he can launch into hilarious feats of slapstick comedy in his bumbling search for peace of mind. Spirituality and old school clowning collide in this unique and explosive solo show.”

Trey’s take: Not sure what I expected, but I sure didn’t expect what I got: Patrick Bussink as a dorky (if impressively flexible) office drone with singularly passive-aggressive relationship with his briefcase. Also a deep yearning for a few minutes to think — the solution to which yearning he imagines he can buy.

It is, as that “can’t even talk” suggests, almost entirely wordless, but like the similarly giddy 7(x1) Samurai it’s chock-full of incident. Nearly unrecognizable in his high-waisted, greasy-haired nerd disguise, the actor — he was the intensely moving Jesus in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot not long ago — knocks himself around, throws his back out, pretzels himself into a sort of aggrieved yogic pose, and generally makes physical-comedy hay, all in the service of a story (and a clearly etched one, too, words or no) about a little guy who discovers too late that what he wants isn’t what he needs.

See it if: You think funny + existential angst = the perfect night out.

Skip it if: Like my seatmate, you’ve never met an actor who could make the silent-clown thing work for you.

Overheard at Fort Fringe:

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

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.

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.

A sober moment, as Fringe madness heats up, to note the passing of John MacDonald, artistic director of the Washington Stage Guild.

He died after a fall at his Mt. Rainier home on Sunday. My sincere condolences to Ann Norton — his partner at home and the co-conspirator behind a company that presented a great deal of intelligently made, lovingly presented theater — and to all who knew John and loved him.

OK, so it’s afternoon. But for some of us, that’s like morning. Especially the day after Fringe.

Can’t write at length, ’cause I’m busy chasing bits and pieces to make a nice Ingmar Bergman page. But I did want to say hi, if only to respond to Curious, who can’t seem to get enough of Fringe, or of Fringe & Purge:

So did people go to the closing party? See any great shows on saturday or sunday? I’d love to hear some of the final headcounts/numbers from the Fringe organizers.

Well, Curious:

1). Yes, people did go to the closing party. There was much karaoke, much of it quite thoroughly wretched. There were some awards presentations, none of which were in the least bit audible. But I’ll get the details from Julianne later.

2). I quite liked Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, and the Pabst and Popcorn Faustus. But again, those have been much discussed, so I’m not going to say much more.

3). Final headcounts and other numbers will be forthcoming, but not today. Firstly, I’m not sure they’re available yet. Secondly, I’ve been told rather firmly not to call Julianne today, for reasons I’m sure you can understand. Or maybe you can’t — but I’m still not gonna call her.

I will, however, check in with her later this week, and get back to y’all with some final Fringe thoughts. Meantime, feel free to chime in here with your own Fringe post-mortems. What did you like about the way it worked this time around? What left you cold? Will you miss the Warehouse?

Go ahead and cheer, jeer, or whatever — and I’ll try to work as much of it into my conversation with Julianne as possible.

Saw this priceless sign in the window at the Warehouse.

Now, for those of you who don’t remember as far back as last weekend, when Nelson’s review ran in the WashPo, the whole quote was:

“… lured an audience in with the promise of nude puppets but stupefied patrons with its ineptitude. Go if you like awkward silence.”

Heh. Guess the luring continues.

So, we’re almost done.  How’re you holding up?

Some of us were officially done by last night. (Didn’t stop us from commenting — and reviewing — which makes me giggle.)

At this point, I’m catching up on stuff others have  recommended (or not) — Too Much Light at 1 o’clock, then the 3 o’clock of The Drunkard, which I’ll be writing up for next week’s paper.  May try to get back over to Fringe Central for the 7:15 of that Hamlet thingy I mentioned yesterday.

Meanwhile, I’m also curious about the ‘Future of Fringe’ panel, at 5 o’clock at the Atlas — but obviously I’m not gonna make that, ’cause I gather Drunkard is longish. So, somebody take notes, eh?  And report back?

This one’s from the boyfriend — I was being tempted by the devil (and the Pabst) …

The Tell-Tale Heart and the Mind of Poe
The Scientarium

Remaining Performances:
Sunday, July 29, 6 pm

They say: “An exciting environmental theatre piece which incorporates live percussion and ambient sound in the telling of some of Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous stories and poems. Enter into ‘the mind of Poe’ as The Endstation Theatre Company of Central Virginia takes you on a thrilling theatrical journey.”

Keith’s take: Sometimes it’s more effective — more menacing, more threatening — to be quiet than it is to be loud. Look, for example, at some of the creepiest performances from actors who have burned themselves into our collective consciousness as guys you don’t want to run into on a country road at night: Jack Nicholson, Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Walken (well, OK, not in his latest outing, but in some of his more menacing roles).

As a piece of environmental theater, which is how it’s being publicized, Tell-Tale Heart is completely successful. Indeed, if you didn’t know that CapFringe’s show-venue pairing process involved a certain amount of randomness, it would be tempting to think that the performance space in the Scientarium was specifically built to create the world of this play, protecting the audience from the inmates — er, the performers. The space is even aptly named: Scientarium/Sanitarium … And the performers — particularly when they’re cowering silently in corners, crannies, and cupboards, or when they crouch wordlessly obsessed with their own thoughts or ticks — create an atmosphere that might very well be like the one where Poe’s protagonists would have ended up.

The problem comes with the delivery of Poe’s texts themselves. Perhaps in an effort to illustrate the author’s progression toward madness, each tale starts with some intensity and builds pretty quickly to a fevered pitch, resulting in a fairly shallow arc for each. Likewise, the percussive effects — whether being produced by actual or improvised instruments, or by the banging of cupboard doors — would be more effective if used with more moderation and modulation. The upper end of the energy and volume spectrums are covered, but the company doesn’t seem interested in what might emerge if the lower and more contained ranges were explored. I’m guessing, given that it’s a pretty uniform problem, that it’s less a lack of ability than a perplexing directorial choice.

See it if: You have an affinity for Poe and want to see some of his texts exuberantly performed in an appropriate environment.

Skip it if: You’re bored (or annoyed) by sustained car chases, shouting matches, or continually slamming doors and noise.

P.S. According to IMDb, Christopher Walken has read “The Raven” for an audio book. I’ll be looking for that.