Sam Rabinovitz and Sara Bickler in HAMLET REFRAMED, which won Best Drama at the Pick of the Fringe Awards Sunday night.

We did not review Grain of Sand Theatre‘s Hamlet Reframed, which won the Best Drama award. Exchange forgiveness with us, noble Hamlet Reframed. Oh, wait: You haven’t done anything to us that warrants penance. Anyway, we hope this video with (in order of appearance) cast members Sara Bickler & Kelsy Meiklejohn, director Carl Brandt Long, and actor John Stange will atone for our sin-of-neglect against you.

We didn’t review iKilL, either — well, I sort of did — but that is the haunting, morbid, noh-and-Kabuki-inpsired piece upon which Capital Fringe Executive Director Julianne Brienza and Producing Artistic Director Scot McKenzie chose to bestow their Directors’ Award. Writer/director Izumi Ashizama vanished before I could find her with my camera, but I spoke with cast members (from left to right) Nick Horan, Vanessa Noland, Raechel Noland, and Jason Glass.

Moving on, then! Right here you have Allyson Harkey, Karen Lange, and Toni Rae Brotons of Pinky Swear Productions discussing their Best Musical winner, CABARET XXX: Les Femmes Fatales. The Fringe and Purge Action News and Commentary Squad’s Emery Uwimana observed, “This show is a big middle finger in the air to anyone opposed to four confident and sexually liberated women who repeatedly ask the audience, ‘What’s wrong with being a slut?’” They’re all a nice, demonic shade of crimson in this video, which only seems appropriate.

Priscilla Dreams the Answer was voted Best Comedy. I spoke with director/coproducer Emily Todd and co-producer Aubri O’Connor about the show that the FPANCS (pronounced “shield”)’s Ian Buckwalter praised as inventive, skillful, balletic and quirky.

Don’t forget to read Rebecca J. Ritzel‘s fine investigation into the near-total disappearance of dance entries from the Capital Fringe Fesitval. This is true: Until like a week ago, Bec thought Han Solo was named Hans Solo, which is why she writes about dance. She has not seen the final film in the globally beloved Gary Potter fantasy series yet.

Capital Fringe founding executive director Julianne Brienza and audience services manager Cory Ryan Frank at last night's festival-closing party.

It was a Capital Fringe Festival in which technically impressive shows—whether the technique on offer was digital or manual—were the talk of the Baldacchino Gypsy Tent Bar.

It was a festival that cost more to attend than in prior years, at least until a withering heat wave inspired a $12 weekend ticket special.

And if it didn’t seem mildly, casually sexist to proclaim a festival in which six of the nine big award-winners were female-run companies The Year of the Woman, then we would go right on ahead and do that.

(Oops.)

It’s a fact that lady-run companies ruled the TheatreMania-sponsored Pick of the Fringe Awards, winning in five of the eight categories. (How’d we get to six out of nine? Well, the Best Dance victor was a tie between two entities, the DC Aerial Collective for UPheaval and Verena Lucia for SHE. )

Best Comedy went to Nu Sass Productions‘s Priscilla Dreams the Answer, directed by Emily Todd and produced by Todd and Aubri O’Connor. Best Solo Performance went to Katie Molinaro‘s punky suite of retribution-rock against her former boyfriends, On the Rag to Riches. (She’s moving to Los Angeles pretty soon, so fellas of the District won’t have to sleep with one eye open for too much longer.)

Molinaro’s show shared a theme as well as a venue (the suffocating Baldacchino Gypsy Tent) with the Best Musical winner, Pinky Swear Productions‘s rowdy, randy CABARET XXX: Les Femmes Fatales. Even the triple-digit heat index didn’t prevent the show’s final performance, at 6 p.m. Friday evening, from selling out.

Allyson Harkey, Julianne Brienza, and Karen Lange. Harkey & Lange are co-artistic directors of Pinky Swear Productions, whose CABARET XXX won Best Musical.

Best Experimental production went to Pointless Theatre Company‘s The Super Spectacular Dada Adventures of Hugo Ball.

The Directors’ Award, which Capital Fringe Executive Director Julianne Brienza and Producing Artistic Director Scot McKenzie bestow on one festival entry each year for professionalism and artistic excellence, went to iKilL, a challenging, Japanese-themed movement piece performed in the stifling Apothecary venue. It was written and directed by Izumi Ashizawa, who has staged shows around the world. With its supernatural air of dread and its operatic style of acting, the show to me recalled legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa‘s 1965 ghost story, KWAIDAN.

Taking home Best Drama award was Grain of Sand Theatre‘s Hamlet Reframed, which examines the titular melancholy Dane from the point of view of the other characters in the play, excising all of Prince Hamlet’s famous soliloquies. Carl Brandt Long directed the piece.

Best Overall went to Marshall Pailet and A.D. Penedo‘s musical satire (there’re two kinds of musicals nowadays, satires and Oklahoma!) Who’s Your Badhdaddy?, Or How I Started the Iraq War. Its producer, Charlie Fink, was behind last year’s Best Musical winnter, Super Claudio Brothers, as well as the concurrent F#*king Up Everything.

Of course, award-winners are not necessarily always the most unique or notable examples of their form. There were no shortage of imaginative shows this year that didn’t take home trophies, which are in this case actually paper certificates. “If you didn’t win an award tonight, please relax,” Brienza said during the ceremony last night, adding that of 17 shows she’d taken in this year—a personal record—”only one of them was bad.”

I saw 16 shows this year. In my unscientific estimation, both ambition and quality of execution seemed to have risen across the board.

Traditionally, the Fringe format—at least as practiced here in the District—has restricted how ambitious a show can be in terms of physical production, not just because the shows are low-budget, but also because they get very little opportunity to rehearse in the space they’ll actually perform in.

That makes efforts like Illuminate: A Martial Arts Experience, wherein the performers execute jaw-dropping physical feats in the dark, mere feet from the audience, all the more impressive. When John Shryock (who also directed the show) swings his rope-dart, the weapon snaps at at the air close enough to the audience that patrons in the front row, and possibly the fourth, feel it on their faces. That’d be impressive even in a show that had the benefit of lengthy tech rehearsals. (Shryock told me he and his fellow performers practiced their elaborate fight choreography in a space marked off to replicate the exact dimensions of the Warehouse stage.) Meanwhile, UPheaval staged its aerialist acrobatics in the Studio Theatre‘s Mead space without any Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark-type catastrophes.

Sixty-five performances sold out this year.

e-Geaux (beta) was another festival entry that generated substantial buzz. This parody software product demo was so convincing that I had trouble telling how much of it was a joke.

A: All of it, actor/producer Joseph Price assured me. While I understood that the specific products promoted during the show — a self-explanatory photo-alteration app called Furry-izer; a Facebook plug-in called eGeaux-Stroke — were fake, I assumed that Pepys, Inc. was a real startup that would be rolling out some kind of genuine social networking product in the near future.

A big reason the illusion was so persuasive was because of its digital sophistication. Price and his castmates invite arriving audience members to “opt-in” via a custom-built web portal. Once you opt-in, Price’s confederates appropriate your Facebook account to complete a demographic analysis of each house, recommendations of who among your fellow audience members you should friend-as-a-verb, and some hilarious new captions for your photos—for all in attendance to enjoy, naturally. (I didn’t opt in, but my publicly available mug ended up in the show anyway. Price said it was a screw-up and apologized.) It takes real techy know-how to do those things. So the tech-elves working on the show — Chuck Harmston, Allen Leis, and Hannah Poferi — were doing all that highly skilled labor (effectively) for free, just for fun?

Yep, Price told me.

Perhaps because of the first price increase in Capital Fringe history, the festival’s five years of steady expansion leveled off, with the festival slimming its roster by 10 percent (from 137 shows in 2010 to 124 this year) and selling about 20 percent fewer single tickets. The final tally of about “just over” 27,000 individual tickets was good enough to make this the second-most-attended Capital Fringe, but fell well short of last year’s all-time high of 33,897.

Audience participation is perhaps more prevalent among Fringe fare than theater at large, but even so, this year’s preponderance of shows wherein the audience was critical to the very conception of the finished work still felt notable.

Fringe artist emeritus-turned-invaluable Fringe & Purge Action News and Commentary Squad member Ryan S. Taylor pointed this out in our “critique the critics” dialogue between our bloggers and Fringe artists last week. An incomplete list of audience-participation shows: Megan and David’s Low-Cost Creativity Workshop, Gwendolyn & Cicely’s Fantastical Capital Balloon Ride, Who Killed Captain Kirk?, Tactile Dinner Car, Stevie Jay‘s life, love, sex, death… and other works in progress (a multi-chakra extravaganza), eGeaux (Beta). There’re surely more.

A few other trends I observed, if an accumulation of two can be called a trend:

Dylan Marron and Jo Firestone. Their MEGAN AND DAVID'S ORIGINAL LOW-COST CREATIVITY WORKSHOP was one of many audience-participation shows this year.

Meanwhile, Jo Firestone and Dylan Marron won the Directors’ Award last year for their Ridgefield Middle School Talent Nite, which they continue to perform around the country. Their Megan and David made its debut here. Our critic, Benjamin J. Freed, didn’t like it nearly as much as I did. Like Abe Lincoln‘s cabinet, the Fringe & Purge Action News and Commentary Squad is a team of rivals.

Shows Performed in the Warehouse, in the Dark, Using TRON-y, Rave-y Neon Visuals: Illuminate and Illuminopolis, a burlesque revue that featured fire-eating and a stripper who did Illuminate‘s L.E.D. gloves one better, donning L.E.D. pasties.

Shows Featuring Jokes About the Feebleness of Using the International Star Registry to Name a Celestial Body After Your Sweetheart: Iluminopolis and Hookups, which we reviewed twice. Totally on purpose.

Shows about Roosevelts: The Man in the Arena, about Theodore and Alice, about Alice Longworth Roosevelt.

Outer Space: As contemplated in Paco Madden‘s Who Killed Captain Kirk? and Evan Crump‘s FLYBOY, both of which I have effused about at length.

Remaining Performances:

No more in the 2011 Capital Fringe Festival, because that’s done. But Ellouise Schoettler posts her tour dates on her site.

They say: ”Genealogy Meets Entertainment as 75-year-old storyteller Ellouise Schoettler puts flesh on old family bones to weave this intriguing collage of romance, hunky heroes, love, loss and reunion. Come for fun – leave inspired. Don’t miss this surprise Capital Fringe gem!”

Sophia’s Take:  My Diamond Jubilee, is a title intended to celebrate storyteller Ellouise Schoettler’s 75th birthday this July.  To a great extent this one-woman show is about how she has chosen, so far, to spend her time in life.  Yet, Finding Gus, the show’s other title, may turn out to be more memorable for the audience of Schoettler’s beautifully told story.

Tracing the genealogy of her family is among the endeavors Schoettler has taken on in the past 25 years.  The interest led her on a journey to uncover the details of the life of her late grandfather, Gus Keasler, who passed suddenly, while still a young husband to Schoettler’s grandmother, Ellie, and the father of a toddler daughter, Louie.  The passions for storytelling and genealogy seem to go hand-in-hand.  Schoettler’s desire to discover and create connections between herself, the past, and her audiences is evident in every word of her tale and the simplicity of her presentation.  She guides us through the journey with vivid detail and clarity.  With her we wade through the barriers of inaccurate record keeping and Ellie’s unspeakable grief, to find a Gus that is memorialized in Clemson University football records as the strongest man to have worn the jersey up until that time.

You won’t be missing the lack of spiffy production value in one of these shows, because she neither needs nor attempts to employ them.  A chair, a table with a picture of Gus and Ellie, and three pairs of glasses that allow for subtle shifts between characters, are all that accompany Schoettler to the stage.  No light or sound cues, just a voice and a vibrant orange blouse that links Schoettler to her grandfather’s Clemson colors.

It is a mysterious gift, the ability to make an audience laugh and cry for a family that is not your own and to celebrate the life of a man to whom we have no personal connection.  Yet Schoettler’s story works because so many of have someone we wish we had know better.  We can’t help but be happy for her, and that life has given her the time required to find Gus, and that she has taken the time to share the tale.

See it if:  celebrating life and our connections with others sounds like a good reason to see some live theater.

Skip it if:  the past holds no secrets worth knowing or you can’t get with the notion that less is more.

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, 641 D St. NW

Remaining Fringe Performances:
None…but playing at Woolly Mammoth until Sunday, August 14

Running Time: 90 minutes

They say: “Can Christian Mohammed Schwartzelberg stay true to himself and still get the girl? Or will he lose her to the guy in leather pants? Set in Brooklyn’s indie music scene, it’s a rock musical comedy with heart. And ironic t-shirts.”

Logan’s Take: There’s something rotten in the borough of Brooklyn—the recent, if un-anointed Ground Zero of indie rock in the very city that birthed it—and you’d be right to be suspicious of its present state. The New York Times might have run a moratorium on the word “hipster,” but that hasn’t quelled the Third Great Migration of white, liberal arts grads ‘cross the East River to gentrifying neighborhoods like Bushwick, Broadway Junction, and Bed-Stuy. As with their Jamaican counterparts, music and authenticity is de rigueur for these Trustafarians. To wit, the sun never sets on indiedom without some blog x touting this band y as the next real thing. At first glance, the ambitions of the stage musical—even a DIY one such as this—might seem anathema to college rock’s slacker ennui. But David Eric Davis’ love letter to the culture that loves to hate itself is so well-conceived, so perfectly executed by the cast, pit, and crew, that even the most ironically minded hipsters couldn’t help but proffer a genuine reblog.

The District’s Lee August Praley stars as the ecumenical Christian Mohammed Schwartzelberg. Having studied queer theory at Bard, he’s preternaturally beta and pines perpetually for the stunning Crystal Mosser’s Juliana—“the only non-lesbian to earn a queer studies sheepskin from Sarah Lawrence.” John Fritz, he of real-life Georgetown rockers Mass Ave., plays it close as Christian’s best frenemy Jake. (Seriously, if you’re sitting in the front row, be prepared for your own Sticky Fingers zoom-in courtesy of Jake’s water-tight jeans.) I hasten to give away too much of a good thing, as half the fun here is following the bed-hopping from dive bar to open mic to, in a Nick and Norah’s final destination kind of way, McCarren Pool. Never one to ruin jokes, I will say that maybe funnier is the on-stage skewering of sacred cows like Iggy Pop, Robert Smith, and in a Manufacturing Consent sort of mood, Noam Chomsky. As a not-too-subtle parody of Yeah Yeah Yeah frontwoman Karen O, Arielle (the vivacious Crystal Arnette) probably gets the best songs, as any tune about premature ejaculation that finds you still humming on your way out of the theater has got to be a good one. If I had but one complaint, it would be the lack of stage time for Dani Stoller’s Ivy. The actor with the best pipes in the corps, Ms. Stoller hails from Brooklyn herself.

Ultimately, this show succeeds where bona fide indie-cum-Off-Off-Broadway rockers like Sufjan Stevens and Black Francis haven’t—in realizing that, at the end of the PBR tallboy, P4K and West 44th aren’t really that different after all. Be it Malkmus or Mame, both require a certain suspension of disbelief that their respective fans could ever be so woefully one-sided. That disbelief becomes dispensation here as we delight in the deconstruction of two of the most insular idioms the gangs of New York ever divined. See this show before it literally, and perhaps figuratively, sells the f#@k out. Or, worse yet, before F#@king Up Everything packs up the van and its pretenses, and this last exit to Brooklyn manifests west to a co-op farm outside of Portland, Ore.

See it if: You can laugh with all your organic, gluten-free belly at the punchlines you and your ilk have let yourselves become.

Skip it if: In your heart, you still don’t think you’re a f#@king hipster.

Remaining Performances:

Saturday, July 23, 9 p.m.
Sunday, July 24, 12:30 pm.

Sex on drugs, sex on love, sex from above (or rather, news of such delivered by the angels from on high). That’s what hookups explores—the spectrum of romantic couplings from the dawn of time through present-day one-night stands. And that’s how the play begins: An everyman slips out of the sheets of the air mattress that remains the focal point for the duration of the performance. Bashfully, he slips on his clothes in an attempt to make an undetected exit. Upon waking, the woman asleep launches into a barrage of questioning intended to foster intimacy, which of course comes off as comically clingy. Initially, hookups seems to rely heavily on stereotypes but quickly redeems itself with cutting dialogue that hits a little too close to home and send-ups of various historical pairings. Fitzwilliam Darcy struts around proclaiming “I am wearing a ruffled shirt!” until you realize he and Elizabeth are a modern day couple attempting Jane Austen role-play. Two hilariously awkward tweens visualize their deeply nerdy historical slash fiction pairing of Abraham Lincoln and a male innkeeper. An unbelieving Virgin Mary points out that most visitors that arrive in the night bearing a proclamation from God are usually murderous psychopaths. And in a nice nod to D.C.’s never-ending panda-pregnancy watch, two pandas fumble around in their confinement. (Too soon?) “Maybe I like boy pandas,” wonders the confused male half of the pair sporting corporate-sponsored names. “I can’t really tell the difference.”

Wonderbox, 629 New York Ave. NW

Remaining Performances:

Saturday, July 23, 9 p.m.
Sunday, July 24, 12:30 pm

They say: “What was Plato like in bed? Do pandas get performance anxiety? Who moved third base? And where did Romeo leave his hose? Find out at the original comedy Hookups. We’d love it if you came!”

Greg’s Take: The most genuine human connection I felt in this play was with the panda. Pepsi, a bull panda with performance anxiety, is one of several characters whose sex life is scrutinized in Hookups, a series of comic vignettes. Alongside the insecure and possibly closeted panda, King Arthur, Abraham Lincoln, andthe Virgin Mary see their proclivities and hang-ups dissected in five-to-10 minute chunks, and while a great many of the human-centered shorts don’t approach the universal relatability of their ursine peer, they all wind up being pretty funny in their own ways.

Hookups was written by Alexandra Petri, a humor columnist for The Washington Post who remarked to me at the Baldacchino’s opening night party that she was still on the fence about whether or not she wanted her mom to see the play. In my humble opinion, she doesn’t have a lot to fear. For a play that takes place entirely in and around an inflatable bed, Hookups contains surprisingly little nudity (none) and very few things that a mother would take offense to. The subject of the play isn’t so much sex as it is the awkward sooooo sensation that strikes immediately after the deed is done.

As should be expected of any work that more or less meditates on the same theme for 60 minutes, Hookups often teeters on the brink of repetition. On the whole, though, it manages to steer clear of verging into been-there-done-that territory, thanks in large part to its incredibly talented cast. Director Laura Hirschberg has assembled an extremely strong cadre of five actors, who play at least a dozen roles apiece. Though they avoid dramatic, scenery-chewing changes in voice and gate with each new character, there’s never the sensation that these guys are repeating themselves. Petri is also wise to depart, from time to time, from the two-people-in-bed formula; some of her more rewarding scenes incorporate extra players, like tweenage girls co-authoring steamy historical fiction, and the omniscient voice of God.

But, while the funniness in Hookups is universally reliable, the moments of genuine humanity are few and far between. A couple of the sketches touch on something deeper in the universal human condition, but most of them seem perfectly content to make jokes that are only funny in context. That’s not to say that this is inherently a bad thing , but after a while, I found myself wanting for some substance with my sweets. Petri’s background as a humor columnist is evident in the material: While they’d probably be hilarious in print, the jokes here telegraph their payoffs too quickly. Often, they’re simply too obvious.

All told, Hookups plays like a special sex-themed episode of Saturday Night Live. Some of it’s good, some of it’s so-so, and some of it, like the vignette with the panda who has too much respect to mount his mate, is downright hilarious. It’s hit-or-miss, sure, but it seems cruel to begrudge a few missteps in a play with so much silliness in its heart.

See it if: Yo’ve often wondered what various historical and fictional characters were like in the sack.

Skip it if: You’d really prefer not to think about Abraham Lincoln that way.

Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, 545 7th St. SE

Remaining Performances:

Saturday, July 23 at 8 p.m.

They say: ”God has had it. We’ve spent centuries desecrating Her favorite planet and She’s ready to bring another Great Flood. Can an extravagant director and clueless bunch of classical actors produce an eco-friendly farce in an hour and save the world???”

Ali’s Take: Tough week at work? You probably don’t have it as tough as Billie, the theater director called “Broadway’s Barracuda” and the surprise protagonist of Terri McKinstry’s new play 70 Million Tons. We first meet Billie as she storms into a rehearsal for her Off-Off-Broadway production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. While it’s unclear exactly why Broadway’s most feared director is stuck directing a low-budget production in Brooklyn, it’s very clear she means business. Billie, played with agile anger by Tracy Jones, immediately starts ordering everyone around. The unruly actors start cooperating, the bumbling stage manager scrambles to bring her a bottle of water, and it seems like things might be going Billie’s way.

That is until time suddenly freezes and Billie gets a surprise visit from the Big Guy himself, or rather the Big Gal, and boy is she pissed. God, simply referred to as “G” by her sidekick Ozie, appears as a big-haired, tall-heeled, sexy woman played with deft comic timing by Stephanie Williams. Ozie is a human manifestation of the Earth’s ozone layer, complete with oxygen mask and ailing body. While God rages at Billie over her wasteful ways, Ozie laughs lovingly from the sideline, kind of how an old lady with emphysema might smile at someone smoking a cigarette right next to her. God gives Billie an ultimatum: Either she drop her production of The Tempest to produce the biblical farce Not Even Noah (penned by God herself) or incur her wrath, otherwise known as an epic flood that will wipe out humanity. Here’s the kicker: The production must be good for the environment and ready to go in just one hour. Billie will earn five points for every Earth-friendly deed she completes, and must reach 100 points before the clock stops ticking.

Admittedly, it’s a ridiculous concept. But it’s ridiculous, heartfelt, and funny—perfectly calibrated for Fringe, and well-executed by the Capital City Players. Director Christopher Tully keeps the pace up and highlights the clever parts of McKinstry’s script. The environmental theme, surprisingly, doesn’t grate: Lessons about composting and energy-saving light bulbs are served with a dose of irony. These are actors after all, and they’re more than a little reluctant to change their indulgent ways to save Mother Earth. It’s the rare play to benefit this week from Washington’s record-breaking temperatures.

See it if: Your idea of fun includes composting, time travel, and game-show antics.

Skip it if: You don’t want to spend one of your last precious Fringe days trekking over to Capitol Hill.

Fringe fanatic / anime enthusiast / competitve Bridge player / Whig Party member Lawrence Hayes at Fort Fringe Friday night

So I was talking with Capital Fringe Festival Supreme Allied Commander Julianne Brienza last night about her and her confederates’ decisive action to counter this soul-searing heatwave by cutting ticket prices from $17 to $12. Based on no data, and drawing upon the nigh-Greenspanian fiscal savvy that has made me the independently wealthy man of leisure that I am so, so not, I suggested she take the festival’s $300 All Access pass and make it, say, $150, reasoning that they’d probably move a lot more of them.

Brienza had told me previously the festival only sells about 10 of these golden tickets, which authorize bearers to see as many shows as they want as many times as they want, each year. (It’s not possible to see every show in the festival unless you have the ability to be in two places at once.) Even at the price of three c-notes, they’re “a loss-leader,” she told me.

So who buys these passes?

Well! I had the good fortune to meet the fascinating Lawrence Hayes at Fort Fringe last night as he was waiting for the house to open for the 11:59 p.m. performance of Embodying Poe. From a bulging briefcase full of newspapers and glossy fliers for Baltimore’s upcoming Otakon anime and manga convention (“Otaku, Start Your Engines!”) he produced his dog-eared, heavily annotated copy of the festival guide, patiently explaining to me the calculus by which he had chosen the 42 shows he’ll have ticked off by the time the festival shuts down tomorrow night. (Unit cost: $7.14, if you care.)

I’ll be honest: I couldn’t follow his system. But then I readily accept that even discounting the lateness of the hour, the neck-wringing squishiness of the night air, and the accumulating pints of Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale (Forgive me/they were delicious/so sweet/and so cold), I would still lack the mental dexterity necessary to keep up with this man in conversation.

Prior to his retirement, he worked in computers for the General Services Administration. The ball cap he’s sporting in this photo is a souvenir from one of his trips to Hawaii to compete in a bridge tournament. He is a big proponent of Rockville’s Victorian Lyric Opera Company, producers of this year’s Fringe entry Foggerty’s Fairy and last year’s Engaged.

Verily, he is man of many passions, passionately pursued. He is quick to tell you that the best World Cup Soccer anthem is the one from 1982—Plácido Domingo‘s “Mundial ’82″; I had to look it up—though he liked the Shakira one from last year OK, too.

He says he is a registered member of the Whig Party, “the party that sent Abraham Lincoln to Congress,” but not the party that sent him to the White House. (You can write-in party affiliation when you register to vote here in the national seat. If registering online, other than the two majors, you can choose “DC Statehood Green,” “No Party” or “Other.”)

Hayes’s discourse follows the rising action of a well-made play, the stakes and rewards gathering steadily to a climax that astonishes.

“I don’t own a home computer,” said the devotee of anime, soccer, defunct political parties, and global news. “I don’t see any reason to get involved with the Internet.”

Remaining Performances:

Saturday, July 23rd at 6 p.m.

They say:  “Sadie is turning 90. ‘Life is wonderful? Really? So where did everybody go? Living your life, it’s like open heart surgery: a big annoying pain!’”

Sophia’s Take: Sadie sits alone in her New York City apartment on the eve of her 90th birthday.  What is the meaning of life at that age?  How does one find purpose when most of your life is lived and behind you?  These are not small questions and Open Hearts, written and performed by Miriam Kulick, offers no easy answers.  
Sadie’s journey is at the core of the story, yet each of Kulick’s six characters is searching for a type of fulfillment that is difficult to find; a purpose in life, the support of loved ones, and freedom.  As the tagline–”Living your life, it’s like open heart surgery: a big annoying pain!”–suggests, there is plenty of pain and annoyance to go around.  The welcome surprise is that Kulick’s play is more charming and hopeful than the quote, taken in isolation, suggests.  She has infused humor and tenderness into each moment of her performance.

For the most part, Kulick moves with ease and clarity between the six roles.  I am not entirely sure of the age of the character Greta, or her relationship to Sadie.  Also, Kulick’s transformation into the fix-it guy, Fernando, had me momentarily thinking he was a cleaning lady.  However, Sadie’s daughter Deborah, Deborah’s lover Henrietta, and the refugee, Anwar, have entirely unique voices and bodies. 

Director Jeanette Buck keeps the production simple and the staging grounded by what is motivating the characters.  Kulick is wonderfully adroit at keeping up the pace, while adjusting her energy level to suit the emotional state of each person.  Henrietta is as lively as Anwar is defiant, and Sadie can kvetch at the rate of a New York minute.

Billed as an hour, the show actually clocks in at more like 45 minutes, and could stand to be longer.  Sadie has lived to the age of ninety, so mourning the loss of loved ones is inevitably a part of her story.  Kulick offers a more thorough portrayal of a woman who misses her beloved sister and husband than of a mother whose child has committed suicide.  I suspect Greta is Sadie’s granddaughter, because she is certainly haunted by the specter of a woman who could not find reason enough to survive.  I would happily have given the time required to watch Kulick delve into how the loss of a child might compromise Sadie’s will to endure.

Though Sadie could be tempted further to close her heart to all that life can offer, her process of renewing her sense of purpose is delightful to watch.  As Kulick would have it, the question of how we can continue to be of service to the people we love is always worth the asking.

 See it if:  You care to take in a short, sweet, thoughtful play–or are simply missing the cadence of New York City.

Skip it if:  You want nothing to do with contemplating your own, or anyone else’s, mortality.

Remaining Performances:

Friday, July 22^nd, 6 p.m.
Saturday, July 23^rd, 7:30 p.m.

Running Time: 70 minutes

They say: “Rob and Flick aka ‘Assembly Required,’ the edu-tainers and self-proclaimed artistic geniuses behind last year’s hit shlecture (that’s a show lecture) about musicals return with a new assembly that will teach you everything you need to know about comedy.”

Derek’s Take: At the supernova start of Assembly Required, Joshua Morgan hops onto Brian Sutow‘s back and then scrambles beneath his outstretched arm, as if he’s a teat-seeking monkey infant. So cute, but… something doesn’t seem quite right about that throbbing house music. In another moment he’s cradling Rob’s torso like an inverted tortoise shell, forming a layer of homoerotic kevlar, and by the time they fall to the floor in an embrace worthy of Boogie Nights, a wave of barely-contained anarchy floods the theater. Is that nervous laughter I hear? Not quite, but you get the sense that Rob (Sutow) and Flick (Morgan) would prefer it that way in this raucous and raunchy free-for-all that feels as though it’s always about to come unhinged.

The object, here, is a lesson on the dos and don’ts of comedy. C-O-M-E-D-Y for you prisoners and, one hopes, high school seniors in the captive, attendance-mandatory crowd of Morgan and Sutow’s collective imagination. As a pair of “enter-teachers” dressed in track suits filched from a gangland surplus warehouse, they conjure visions of a misanthropic Richard Simmons and Tom Hanks pulled from a 1980s time warp and thrust onto a vaudevillian stage. The show’s a grab-bag of amusing and often clever slapstick, audio/visual, audience participation, and dance and musical elements that almost always hit their comic marks if failing to serve any discernible storyline. This despite the claim, however facetious, that comedy is at essence the answer to a very simple question: “Why?”

But if you want plot, come back to the Mountain for Sunday service; the closest thing Rob and Flick manage here is a running gag, a contest of sorts, on who can pull off the greater number of practical jokes on the other during the performance. The battle begins with grade school pranks – atomic wedgies, whoopie cushions – but soon escalates into Tarantino-inspired mayhem, with each success accompanied by a hilarious song-and-dance number from the Kid ‘n Play handbook and a tally on a nearby whiteboard. “Prac-ti-cal…” (Music! Dance!) “Joke!” It’ll make you want to go home and smash your roommate with a chair.

Sutow’s script and Isaac Klein’s direction leave the impression that the show is being made up as it goes along, but in fact it’s a tight production that wilts only during the too-long and sluggish tutorial on improv comedy. (Ironically, the show relies on a significant amount of improvised, slightly confrontational, back-and-forth with the audience that’s lively and inspired by comparison.) But from there the ambiguously gay duo quickly rebuilds momentum, careening through sequences featuring rubber chickens and dicks, shirtless muffin-top dances, and the production’s coup de grace, a gratuitous striptease that, somehow, seems inevitable. The only wonder is that, for a show with its tongue so-far-in-cheek, they didn’t include a segment on blow-job pantomime. Maybe next year.

Both Morgan and Sutow maintain incredible energy throughout, selling the zaniness as only two comedy-obsessed hucksters can. I can imagine them helping the Department of Homeland Security conduct citizenship readiness seminars, as if to say, “Hey, green card holders – you sure you want to sign up for this?” Odds are, those misty-eyed immigrants will answer with a resounding “Yes!” Nothing, after all, is more American than the dumb yet inspired fun of Assembly Required.

See it if: Your prescription for Paxil has lapsed and you need a guaranteed pick-me-up.

Skip it if: If your health plan doesn’t cover ailments caused by contact with sweaty ass cheeks.