The Bedroom – at Fort Fringe

Remaining Performances:
Sunday, July 11, at 8 p.m.
Thursday, July 15, at 10 p.m.
Saturday, July 17, at 3 p.m.
Saturday, July 24, at 5:30 p.m.
Saturday, July 25, at 2 p.m.

They Say: “Which thrills most: the chase or the finish? Old Salt instructs young Alpa in the art of pursuit. The quarry are no lame deer: Myra, Lyla and Nona prefer to play Artemis to their vision of Venus. Whose illusions win?”

Trey’s Take: They also say this, on the Shoestring Theatre website: “We believe that, like Duke Ellington’s maxim about music, there are two kinds of theater, good and bad.” Really? You’re just gonna tee it up like that?

In a D.C. park, an older gent (writer-director Frank Mancino) coaches a younger fellow (Chris Whitney) in the fine art of deceiving the ladies. They respond to ‘I Saw You’ ads — hey, thanks for the shout-out! — though they know quite well they’re not the men wanted; they rent strollers, complete with infants, to help start conversations and slip past defenses. Old Salt’s argument: The hunt is where the real passion is. Everything that comes after the pursued slows and signals interest is just another step toward the end of the affair.

Fine, if you’re cynical like that, but give me a whit more character. Mancino wedges three short variations on his theme into the first act, which doesn’t leave much room for anyone to develop either personality or narrative momentum, then shifts gears to solicit audience input for two more sections, these more explicitly improvised. (The whole thing adds up to just an hour.) Nancy Flores, who plays all the female parts during the park-bench shenanigans, returns with Whitney to inhabit such picked-from-a-hat scenarios as “You’re porn stars shooting a movie; he wants to break up, she wants to be admired” and “You’re Mitch McConnell and Michelle Obama, meeting at the Congressional Country Club; he wants to get high, she wants her feet tickled.” This is where I should stress that I am not making any of this up, and that at the performance I saw Saturday, Whitney and Flores did in fact try to make both of those scenes work.

They did not enjoy a roaring success. Perhaps that was because an audience of five is always going to laugh less than a full house.  Or perhaps it was because the graceful, resourceful Flores seemed to be shouldering most of the work of nudging the scenes toward their stated goals, while a hapless Whitney faffed about saying things like “Really?” and “Oh, well then, let’s do that.” But mostly, I think, it was because this curiously disjointed exercise  isn’t quite sure whether it wants to be 20 minutes of jaundiced satire or half an hour of lighthearted improv. It’s trying to be both — and we can all guess what Duke Ellington would have said about that.

See It If: You’re really, really, really fond of improv. Or of apples.

Skip It If: You have a feeling you know what kind of theater this is.

iSchool Musical

Source
1835 14th St., NW

Remaining Performances:

Saturday July 10 @ 8:00 pm
Friday July 16 @ 8:00 pm
Saturday July 17 @ 8:00 pm
Friday July 23 @ 8:00 pm
Saturday July 24 @ 2:00 pm
Saturday July 24 @ 8:00 pm

They Say: WIT’s hit show iMusical creates and performs and instant musical inspired by Glee, High School Musical . . . and suggestions from the audience.  Every note, lyric, character and line of dialogue is improvised in this hilarious and subversive sensation.

Adam’s Take: I agree.  Scripted lines are definitely overrated.  You’ve just got to let the words fly off the tongue.  Life is spontaneous and so, too, should be the stage.  Yet the cast of iSchool Musical were good enough to fool the audience into thinking they’d wasted weeks at rehearsals.

Of course, only improv theater could produce a show that melded the tale of an underground drama club at NOVA’s very own Thomas Jefferson High School (one of several audience-submitted elements) with that of an overachieving student who is seduced by a sausage maker-cum-opera singer named Carmen.   Could these lives really collide?  All in seventy minutes?  Only when there is no chance to think about what should rationally come next.  No time to dwell on the absurdity of the situation.  You just go with it.

What makes this show even more notable is the musical numbers that come when least expected.  Tired of talking?  Just break into song.  The masterful repertoire of  keyboardist/director Travis Ploeger was a big part of why each scene felt stranger than the last.  Washington Improv Theater has been around for a long while, and that experience was evident in the way the  cast worked as a team capable of taking cues from each other and running as far with a joke as possible — miles, it sometimes seemed, until some other unexpected twist is thrown their way.  This made the show not only funny but also engaging, no matter how crazy the plot became.  And the cast was still able to somehow tie most of the loose ends together to pull off an unexpectedly happy ending.

The performance I saw was the 100th in WIT’s iMusical series, (but the debut of the spinoff iSchool Musical) and with improv, there’s no way to know what the next show will be like.   But if show number 101 is anywhere as good, it would be hard to come away disappointed.

See It If: You believe the best playwrights do their work on stage while the play is happening.

Skip It If: You enjoy watching Hamlet because you know there is only one way for it to end each time.

Billy the Kid: First Exhumation

Remaining Performances:
July 17th, 7 pm
July 25th, 5 pm

They say: Directed by a former member of Herbert Blau’s performance group Kraiken, Redd Shifft tackles similar performance issues, including spontaneous improvisation, psycho-association, physical and vocal reflexivity, all in a highly charged, non-linear context of the body longing to know.

Llewellyn’s take: Be grateful for the Fringe Festival: these experimental theater opportunities that are few and far between in DC.  Dramatic improvisation may not be everybody’s cup of tea for sure, but I like it as a palate-cleanser from a world filled with Legally Blonde the Musicals.

So here we have Billy the Kid: A First Exhumation, a storytelling experiment that delves into the fight-or-flight mentality.  Intertwined with the stream of consciousness re-enactment of Billy’s life are modern tales of revenge and revenge fantasies. Threats punctuate dream sequences while a tense Western gunfight-strum plays in the background.  The characters are there only to mock and threaten each other—just the way Artaud might have wanted them to.

The acting is best in the monologues, wherein the characters have full range to run free with their emotions, but in between these, the straightforward retelling of Billy’s life is fraught with the caricatures of the old West.  The staid stereotypes of rowdy drunkards and saloon shootouts are so ingrained from TV and radio shows that it’s hard to get past them and find something that doesn’t sound like, “Yew shot mah paw”.  The story touches on a personal side of Billy himself—that he might not be the gun-swinging archetype people generally assume him to be, but just another person who let his emotions get ahead of himself.  The monologues play off of this narrative in ways that aren’t completely apparent, but they make for a good story.

See it if: You like dramatic improv and a good fight story.

Skip it if: Western accents make you think of Bonanza reruns.

That is all.

UPDATE, 11:45 p.m. – So just to revisit: I’m not going to write a full review, because I’m not sure quite where to start.  

This was one of the most out-there things I’ve seen yet at Fringe; can’t say it was good, not sure I want to say it was bad, exactly. (It had the distinct whiff of the Radical Faerie about it, and everybody needs a little Faerie dust once in a while.) So let’s leave it at mad — and perhaps spectacularly ill-advised, in a town as buttoned-up as this one. 

Of the 18 audience members who came, 12 of us survived until the end. Which was convenient, because it meant no one was left out when lead performer Huilo Marvavilla produced a dozen yellow roses and went about bestowing them upon the patrons.

The projections were intriguingly psychedelic, the soundscape much the same; the puppets, whether smallish or enormous, were wonderfully well-crafted.

But the puppetry itself was amateurish and unfocused, the dancing likewise, and the whole thing thoroughly incoherent. Act 2, an improvised and largely undecipherable puppet conversation titled “Tea With Duality,” was possibly the single most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever seen on a stage.

Finally, if I were called upon to offer one technical suggestion, it would be this: If you know that, during the course of your trippy hourlong multimedia paean to peace, you will be donning a giant papier-mache puppet-head and dancing about the darkened performance space, you might think twice about building a spider-web of purple yarn throughout said space before the puppet-head dance.

That way, there will be less stumbling.

Remaining Performances:
Thursday, July 17 @ 5:00 PM; Friday, July 18 @ MIDNIGHT
Saturday, July 19 @ 9:30 PM; Sunday, July 20 @ 2:30 PM

They say: “Who knew that rednecks, slavery, bar mitzvahs, and chicken livers were so funny! Hilarious multimedia romp of sketches, improv, theatre, and video, which reveal the absurdity of prejudice and hate. Has toured the US and UK to rave reviews.”

Sheffy’s take: No, Sammy Davis Jr. is not talking to another black Jew. This show (whose title is missing a “/” between “Black” and “Jew”) stars improv comedians Ron Jones (the black guy) and Larry Jay Tish (the Jewish guy) in an abbreviated version of their Dialogues. This must-see Fringe treat puts “PC” back into ethnic stereotype.

I hate to admit it, but I usually force myself to laugh at stand-up comedians because I can’t actually figure out what everyone else thinks is so funny. Not here—I didn’t have to fake a single snigger in what was easily the most entertaining Fringe show I’ve seen to date. The personalities portrayed by the talented Jones and Tish, their hand puppet alter egos, their racist-but-adorable-granny costumes, and even pre-recorded video projections of themselves that join the conversation fill the stage with enough racists to populate a grand jury in Louisiana. The key to comedy is timing and every movement has been carefully engineered to allow the actors to zip through a myriad of characters—to squeeze it all in, they talk right over their incessant costume changes. As they try to catch their breath between sketches, pre-recorded street interviews illustrate the cultural gulf they are trying to bridge.

As a well-traveled touring show, the performance is almost rote, yet at times they seamlessly switch to improvisation. Aside from an outdated Barry Bonds quip, the references are not yet stale, but there’s room for new material. A word to the wise: the theater was close to full, and it may sell out as word spreads. If you come early to claim a seat, a slideshow of witty aphorisms and black/Jew trivia whets your appetite.

Despite starting the show by telling audiences to “Turn off your cell phones; turn off your prejudices,” making comedy about racism without offending anyone (besides rednecks) takes chutzpah. They succeed because they earnestly want to engage the community in a dialogue about race and culture, and their commitment shines through.

See it if: You liked Avenue Q but didn’t understand that the “monsters” were people of color… or if you want to learn how to wear a yarmulke on a Fro.

Skip it if: You’ve got something else so important that you can’t take an hour from your busy schedule…I’m not your mother so I can’t tell you what to do, but you’re only hurting yourself (and you’ll be haunted by Jewish guilt for the rest of your life).

Remaining Performances:
Sunday, July 13 @ 6:00 PM (The Universe)
Friday, July 18 @ 6:00 PM (Source)
Thursday, July 24 @ 8:00 PM (Source)

They say: “City Folk, a new improvised sitcom about the people you know, but don’t really want to. Over five nights audience members will drive the plot to create a pilot, a few filler episodes, and a series finale. Brand new episodes each night! You speak. We act! Save us from syndication!”

Brett’s take: Youngish improv group ATC (A Theater Company) has an intriguing concept: an improvised sitcom, with a completely different, sequential episode each performance. Whether or not they’re angling for followers to attend each show or not doesn’t matter, since a sitcom, of course, is designed to be jumped into with little background. What ATC does seem to be aiming for here is a modern commedia dell’arte, given the easy-to-follow stock-characters-and-plots format of the sitcom.

Trouble is, they’ve got the structure down pat, but lack the skill and substance to make it funny, or even particularly amusing. Five actors (with the program promising guest improvisers at some performances, but not saying which) take on an appropriate array of stock types: a pompous theater director and her slightly dimbulb producer, who are trying to run a theater company in the basement of a church populated by a nice-guy preacher, a sweet-and-naive choir singer and a wacky old monsignor. The group is funniest when they’re nailing sitcom tropes, like the look-at-the-camera-and-smile credits sequence.

However, the mechanics of plot and interaction (at my performance, the episode theme picked out of a hat was the ‘dream’ episode) produce little besides fumbling amateur improv. It didn’t help that at the performance I saw the plot ended up following the choir singer, who must have been brought in to sing a song or two (her voice is lovely) because her ‘acting’ mostly consisted of repeating the last line spoken to her in a higher pitch. Anu Yadav does deserve credit for milking as many laughs with her expressive face as she can given the sluggish proceedings.

If you do decide to see this show, I recommend waiting until they are at Source, because the inexperience of some of the cast shows as their voices are lost in the echo chamber that is the Universe.

See it if: You give an A for effort.

Skip it if: You’re holding out for the holy grail: the Hilarious Fringe Improv Show.