1409 Playbill Cafe, 1409 14th Street NW

Remaining Performances

Saturday, July 17, at 8 p.m.
Sunday, July 18, at 8 p.m.
Wednesday, July 21, at 8 p.m.
Thursday, July 22, at 8 p.m.
Friday, July 23, at 8 p.m.
Saturday, July 24, at 8 p.m.
Sunday, July 25, at 8 p.m.

They Say: “A gory musical comedy with sex, drugs, and puppets about a killer who finds her victims through dating websites. Molotov Theatre Group (Pick of the Fringe 07′ Best Comedy, 08′ Best Overall) and playwright Shawn Northrip (07′ Best Musical) collaborate.”

Ian’s Take: Internet-enabled romantic encounters always have that element of danger. Unvetted and anonymous, anything could happen. Perhaps that’s the thrill of it for some, but just google “online dating murders” and you might be disabused of that titillation in a hurry. Or, just take in an evening of Molotov Theatre Group‘s bloody, bawdy Horrors of Online Dating.

The “horrors” in this case aren’t the kind you might talk over with a friend in the post-mortem for a particularly awful date: horrifically boring, horribly bad breath, that sort of thing. This is horror on a more visceral level, and I really can’t emphasize the “viscera” in “visceral” enough. A post-mortem is exactly what’s required after a date with Judy, who opens the play singing a song about the metaphorical dangers of dating before unveiling her latest potential paramour tied to a chair. Which is a kink he’s entirely into, until she she cuts a hole in his gut.

Judy has some issues to work through, none of which are helped by the things around her, whether it’s her dismissive cat (who she has regular conversations with), her laptop (which she also converses with, and which has a tendency to encourage her to meet men for murderous trysts), and her anti-psychotic drug Friendzeopene (yes, she talks with that, too). Her co-workers are condescending jerks, and the urge to kill is just too great to ignore, even after she tries to get herself on a self-help program.

Molotov’s production, in Grand Guignol style, doesn’t skimp on the gore. In fact, plastic ponchos are handed out at the door, and it’s suggested you use them, whether in the first row or the last: the energetic spurting of arterial blood can be ever so unpredictable. But this isn’t just humorless disembowlings. It’s also a musical comedy, and in the spaces between the busting open of guts, there’s plenty of less literal gut-busting to be had. When her pill bottle decides to do a little song and dance, he manages to rhyme gonorrhea, diarrhea, and panacea, which is as funny as it is foul.

There are about a dozen scene-changes too many for a show of this size, moving from apartment to office to coffee shop with a frequency that requires a lot of distracting furniture moves every few minutes. But otherwise, it’s an imaginitive staging in Playbill Cafe’s tiny backroom space, with an eerie jump-roping one-woman Greek chorus, and one particularly cinematic murder montage that’s perfectly choreographed for both maximum hilarity and maximum audience blood coverage.

Judy is unquestionably psycho, but Jenny Donovan mixes plenty of personal pathos in with the pain she’s doling out. She has a wide-eyed appeal that you want to root for, particularly when she’s violently doing in internet-stalking creeps who like to prey on women with low self-esteem. At an hour and a half, the show could use a little trim, particularly in all those scene changes, but as much fun as there is to be had in this carnival ride of a show, that’s really only a little too much of plenty of good things. Just be sure you have time to head home for a shower afterwards. And if you bring a date met online, you may want to think twice about taking them back home with you.

See It If: The only thing missing from Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles for you was the potential for interactivity in the bloody murder.

Skip It If: Shows with splash zones, whether Gallagher or Shamu, sound icky.

Jenny Donovan and her long-neglected bottle of antipsychotic meds in The Horror of Online Dating.

The Capital Fringe Festival features just shy of 140 shows this year, but only one, to my knowledge, wherein the audience is offered plastic smocks upon entry. They’re not comfortable, but they’ll protect your clothes in the unlikely event you find yourself at the end of an arterial spray arc of fake blood. Which is actually, now that you mention it, not at all unlikely. By which we mean, it’s possible you will walk out of The Horrors of Online Dating looking like Sissy Spacek at the end of Carrie. The smocks are free and optional.

The comic thriller, about a lonely young woman looking for love on all the wrong websites, is the first musical offering from Molotov Theatre. Dedicated to reviving the grisly French theatrical tradition of Grand Guignol, Molotov is one of the many local outfits for which CapFringe has acted as midwife. The company debuted at the ’07 festival with For Boston. That play, an original piece about a bloody lost weekend written by Molotov founding artistic director Lucas Maloney and Michael Mahon, shared “Best Comedy” honors in that year’s audience-vote Fringe Awards. Its follow-up in the 2008 festival, The Sticking Place, was voted “Best Overall.”

Molotov now does two shows per year outside of the festival — and they just got their 501(c)3 certification in February, which will make them eligible for other sources of funding — but their delight in making audiences squirm pins them now and forever as quintessentially fringe. “We’re doing something different because it’s different,” says Maloney, 28. “We’re not just another company exploring the human condition. We’re going to do something weird and something fun.”

Written by another CapFringe veteran, playwright/composer Shawn Northrip, Horrors packs the powerful one-two marketing punch of singing puppets and nubile exposed female flesh. Both Maloney and co-founder / managing director Alex Zavistovich, who earns his living doing marketing and public relations work for technology companies, are members of the cast. They’re staging it as a find-your-own venue production, at Playbill Cafe, to allow for a full 18-show run. “We want to make sure we’re eligible for the Helen Hayes Awards,” the 48-year-old Zavistovich laughs. But there’s another reason: Chitlins.

Come again?

“We need more time than Fringe can afford us in a Fringe-run venue in terms of setup, but moreso, cleanup,” Maloney says. Molotov’s efforts to adapt its gross-out aesthetic to the spartan accommodations and pit-crew load-in / load-out pace at shared Fringe venues posed some interesting logistical and sanitary problems in years past. Their version of Radha Bharadwaj’s enhanced-interrogation drama Closet Land for last year’s Fringe was in the Redrum space, upstairs in the Fort Fringe complex. Zavistovich liked the room’s creepy atmosphere, but “we didn’t realize until we got there that there was no available water,” Zavistovich remembers. “We bought a heroic amount of wet-naps.”

Performed in The Shop, downstairs from Redrum, The Sticking Place was even sloppier, because what’s blood without guts? “We were shoveling pig intestines off the floor, then mopping it with water we’d carried in from next door,” recalls Maloney.

Wait. Pig intestines?

“We used what they call ‘very clean’ chitlins, which we bought from Safeway,” Zavistovich says. “The chitlin industry has a lot to learn about the phrase ‘very clean.’”

The Horrors on Online Dating will be performed Wednesdays through Sunday at 8 p.m. at Playbill Cafe, 1409 14th St. NW, through July 31. Tickets here.

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube version.

Ok, so you’ve seen what my arm looked like. Well, I walked about 20 blocks or so with my sleeve rolled up and that gash in plain view, and needless to say I got some very interesting reactions. One teenage boy was stupefied by it, and begged me to cover it up. When he found out it was fake he said, “Oh man, that’s tight! You’re gonna scare the shit outta people with that!”

At another point, a man walked out of a storefront just as I was passing him, my arm in his face. “HOLY FUCK!” he screamed (even the capital letters don’t do his expression justice). “Is that a tattoo gone wrong, man? SHIT!”

And then there was the very nice bus boy who was sent by the patrons of his restaurant to make sure I was all right (at this point I was sitting on the sidewalk). I told him I was waiting for a very slow ambulance, but my smirk betrayed me and he knew what was up. Still, he couldn’t take his eyes off my arm.

Probably my favorite reaction of the evening came from a homeless man who was sitting against a building. He saw me and started cracking up. I looked at my arm and then back at him. “Yeah, it’s been a rough day man,” I told him.

“Man, I know how that is,” he said, and I left him there in hysterics.

What was really remarkable, however, was the number of non-reactions, or silent reactions, from people whose eyeballs doubled in size but didn’t say anything, or those who stifled their gasps of horror and moved on down the street. One man averted his young son’s eyes. A girl steered her boyfriend in the opposite direction from me. People at street corners just tended to whisper. I wonder how these bad Samaritans would’ve reacted in the days of the Grand Guignol if they had been fortunate to see a performance by Paula Maxa, the blood theater’s star actress. I leave you with the Molotov Theater’s shocking description of Maxa, and a plug for their Fringe production, The Sticking Place:

In 1917 Camille Choisy hired the actress Paula Maxa, who soon became known as “the Sarah Bernnhardt of the impasse Chaptal.” During her career at the Grand-Guignol, Maxa, “the most assassinated woman in the world,” was subjected to a range of tortures unique in theatrical history, including the following: she was shot with a rifle and with a revolver, scalped, strangled, disemboweled, raped, guillotined, hanged, quarted, burned, cut apart with surgical tools and lancets, cut into eighty-three pieces by an invisible Spanish dagger, stung by a scorpion, poisoned with arsenic, devoured by a puma, strangled by a pearl necklace, and whipped; she was also put to sleep by a bouquet of roses, kissed by a leper, and subjected to a very unusual metamorphosis, which was described by one theatre critic: “Two hundred nights in a row, she simply decomposed on stage in front of an audience which wouldn’t have exchanged its seats for all the gold in the Americas. The operation lasted a good two minutes during which the young woman transformed little by little into an abominable corpse.”

The Sticking Place
The Shop at Fort Fringe

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 19 @ 9:00 PM
Thursday, July 24 @ 8:00 PM
Saturday, July 26 @ 3:00 PM

They say: “The DC News career ladder has quite a few rotten rungs! The Sticking Place tells the story of young professionals sucked into this seedy underbelly of the Capital City. Bloodplay, thrill killing, twisted sexual politics, misfits and jerks. If we don’t disgust you, it’s not for lack of trying!”

Trey’s take: Try harder. With the exception of a few glimmers of wit — and what’s probably the best use of chitlins I’ve seen on a DC stage — this Grand Guignol-inspired black comedy feels like the sort of thing a bunch of Saturday Night Live B-listers might whip up for the company holiday party: a decent germ of an idea, underdeveloped and overplayed.

A curtain-raising video montage (quick-cut images of everything from surgery to S&M to humping monkeys) promises an adventurous evening, and as things progress a few tartly phrased silent-movie scene titles serve up a laugh or two.

But mostly, from its context-setting opening monologue (involving the longest TV-news stand-up in recorded history) to its unsurprising final twist (suggested subtitle: “The Revenge of Catherine Tramell”), Molotov Theatre’s tatty little would-be shocker strikes false note after false note. (D.C. bars close at 2 a.m. on weekends? A sex-and-cutting fad among area hipsters is a story an ambitious TV hairdo complains about having to cover?) In a genre whose shocking, titillating pleasures are supposedly rooted in a commitment to realism, that’s kind of a problem.

More disappointing: That a nominally ballsy young cast and creative team thinks it’ll earn a laugh with a bit of accent-mocking in an Asian-takeout scene. And that a Fringe audience doesn’t get the reference when a solo-on-Friday twentysomething, having just been hung up on by said accent, notes this truism: “I’ve officially hit bottom. I’ve been rejected by Yum’s.”

See it if: Your torn-from-the-sensationalized-headlines needs are too urgent for Law & Order: SVU to satisfy.

Skip it if: You’d hate to defile your fond memories of Cherry Red.