Remaining Performances:
Jul 19th 12 pm
Jul 25th 3:15 pm

They say: You didn’t even know we existed. But now? Now. You do. A new play that tells the spirited stories of four ‘juvie’ girls living on the inside

Suzyn’s take: “The Girls Inside,” Leayne C. Freeman’s new play about teenage girls in juvie, is memorable and exciting from the first moments as the four girls run around in darkness with flashlights, soon getting caught by the police.  The much-maligned Bodega, with its stifling heat and peeling paint, is the perfect venue.

This is not so much a play as a 45-minute slam poem, and the directing—the best I’ve seen at the Fringe Festival this year—is more like choreography.   There are snippets about the girls’ lives; one girl deals with the drug-addicted mother she adores, another was essentially made to sign adoption papers that she couldn’t read.  But mostly there is a sort of anonymity to the characters that the girls play, which allows lines like “The world didn’t want us the first time, so why would it change its mind if we got out?” to speak for everyone.

Jo Higbee brings a bit of dark humor in imitating the adults the girls must deal with.  Her performance is particularly adroit in that she doesn’t seem to be playing the adults so much as playing what the adults look like to the girls.

Perhaps the most haunting moments are the bits of girlish glee and teenage innocence woven throughout the piece.  As much as these girls seem like hardened criminals, when they laugh, they are teenage girls again, particularly Adena Goode, who at times seems hardened and innocent simultaneously.  At one point they form a chorus of wishes and desires: they want a new trial, they want a do-over, they want their mothers, they want a new iPod, they want to go to prom.   When Ayena Hardy’s character talks about losing her virginity in the eighth grade and how it made her feel beautiful, there is a sad sweetness to her performance that is almost unbearable. Several members of the audience cried. Zurin Villanova has a beautiful voice and a real gift for movement.  When she pantomimes getting a cavity search from an invisible person, it’s impossible not to squirm.  Yet she imbues her character with a deep sense of hope.

This is a brilliant show.

See it if:   You want a vivid, emotional, memorable experience and are willing to go through hell with these girls to get it.

Skip it if:  You need a storyline to really get into a play.   There are only characters in the loosest sense and in many ways this show is far more about evoking a sense of place than about the development of characters or the movement of a plot.

Remaining Performances:
July 19th at 3 pm
July 23 at 10:15 pm
July 25th at 6:15 pm

They say: “Get intimate. Enjoy an evening of conversation and poetry in this one woman show combining a dancer’s grace with language laced in feminine sensuality. Join in her discovery.”

Caroline’s take: Part monologue, part performance poetry, and part traditional Indian dance, Neelam Patel delivers a deeply personal show that attempts to find some middle ground between her American and Indian heritage.  As much as she brings the audience into her stories, the result is most therapeutic for Patel herself: Using the performance as a form of release, she shares her experiences, all of them true, as a way of connecting with her past.

The show starts with a series of monologues, beginning in infancy when Patel’s family immigrated to New Jersey.  Adolescence ensues: There are parties with boys, conflicts at school, and disagreements with her parents about Bon Jovi.  When she starts describing her need to fit in among the big-haired blondes however, the reflections turn inward and you can hear Patel reverting to her teenage mentality to tell the story.  That she is so in touch with her ideas and emotions at different times in her life is powerful and makes the show all the more poignant.

As the show proceeds, the monologues transition into performance poems that Patel admits yet more personal.  A particularly intense poem about a passionate relationship with a boyfriend goes over well, but she does not hit her stride until she fuses the aspects of both of her cultures together.  In “Nationhood,” she admits to not feeling at home in either culture—she’s at once too Indian and too American.  But instead of dwelling on the frustration, she sees her nation as the path she creates everyday.  This acceptance of her experience gives the performance even more power.

Incorporating traditional Indian dance is important to Patel (she only started performing her poems after she quit dancing due to an injury) and even though it’s nice to watch, it does not add significantly to the concept of the show.  The dancing allows the audience to step back rather than remain immersed in the stories she tells.  Really, her dances are another narrative altogether, but when each element comes together at the end, you finally understand Patel’s whole story.

See it if: You want to know more about Indian culture, laugh about coming of age in New Jersey, or enjoy Bollywood music.

Skip it if: You’re not interested in 45 minutes of serious self-reflection.

Beyond Dark Corners

Remaining performances:
July 19 at 8 pm; July 23 at 9:30 pm; July 25 at 1 pm

They say: Black, and Gay in struggle with identity. Christopher Prince and Terry Sidney, seasoned Performance Artists push the envelope another notch by creating a riveting evening of poetry, music and stories exploring conflict between self-value, culture and social politics.

Sheffy says: November 4, 2008, was historic.  African-American voters turned out in record numbers to elect Barack Obama. In California, that record black vote has been blamed for ensuring passage of Prop 8, where 7 in 10 blacks voted in favor of a measure that bans gay marriage.  While both the black community and gay community have struggled for their civil rights, traditionally the two have not gotten along.  So what if you’re both black and gay?  Chances are “Beyond Dark Corners” is not just a metaphor for you.

Here, the secret lives of black gay men are revealed in back-to-back one-man performances by Christopher Prince and Terry Sidney.  Each performs four pieces using poetry, song, and storytelling to evoke their respective worlds.  Prince explores identity: life on the down-low, in which men who purport to be straight just sometimes, in the dark, need a man. Prince is more than disappointed with those that won’t come out of the closet: “We hide inside, the dark hangers gouging at our eyes.”  When a transvestite is metaphorically stoned by the community, he is angry that the “black warriors to protect her are hiding in the bars.”

Sidney could tell a story with his facial expressions alone.  Add his dynamic voice, chiseled body, graceful movement… singing (OK, he does have a single weak spot, but luckily he invites guest singer Nikita Vann with a mellifluous voice that soars).  The anchor of the evening was Sidney’s poignant story about a lover who dies of AIDS.  We share the narrator’s fury as he confronts his lover’s mother who has forsaken her son.  She accuses “you people” for killing him with AIDS.  An all-too-common slander for gay love, she belittled their relationship to mere sex, but, the narrator attests, “I was there when he need me the most.”

See it if: You need to balance Fringe’s multiple bare-breasted women swordplay shows with a buff, bare-breasted man doing a sensuous dance with a gleaming white matador-like cape.

Skip it if: Sitting in a very dark room with the wine from the Warehouse bar in your hand and jazz in the background won’t allow you to see anything  beyond the dark corners of the back of your eyelids.

Remaining Shows:
Thursday, July 24 @ 6:00 PM; Friday, July 25 @ 8:30 PM
Saturday, July 26 @ 5:00 PM; Sunday, July 27 @ 12:30 PM

They say: “When small town golden boy Jonah Thompson moves to New York City, he dreams that the city will be his playground but soon he disappears. Two years later his brother Finn sets out to find Jonah, or at least some answers.”

Brett’s take: It’s painful to review a show that clearly has benefited from hours upon hours of effort and attention from thoughtful, hardworking people (who have traveled to D.C. from New York) but that nevertheless leaves you cold. You can see the conviction in the actor’s faces, hear it in their voices, and even see it in the way one of the leads’ limbs shake with apparent nervousness before going into a big scene. But sincerity can’t save this production from pretentiousness and hollowness.

The plot concerns… well, the disappearance of a college student named Jonah. It leaps back and forth from the time leading up to that event and some years afterwards (two years, as far as I could grasp), when Jonah’s younger brother Finn goes to New York City to search for him on Jonah’s birthday. In quick succession, we meet a coterie of educated New York characters, including a writer, a professor, a photographer/physics student, and an aspiring actress/waitress, all of whom had some connection with Jonah and all of whom begin to have new connections to each other. Just why these new connections start happening right when Finn is arriving at the city – besides convenience for writer Darragh Martin- is an unanswered question that points to the problems with the play.

Described by director Sarah Wansley as part “love letter” to New York City as well as “elegy for the simpler selves we left behind,” the play interjects poetic monologues, spoken by the dissapeared Jonah in front of projections of New York City (subway, traffic, Statue of Liberty), between lightning-fast scenes in past and present. I found this poetry to be self-indulgent – while clever, I do not know just what a description of the subway lines of New York tangling and untangling themselves really illuminates, either about the characters or the City, metaphorically or otherwise. And this tendency towards overwriting and showiness extends into the dialogue scenes, the result being that characters often talk about images of grief instead of expressing the grief itself. Similarly, when New York is described, the poetic aspirations force the language into cliché. We all know that there is a dark side to New York and a glamorous one, that different people see it differently; it would be one thing to see this displayed, but instead we just hear it said. And the fact that New York has bums and tourists sharing avenues is not what makes New York special; it hardly differentiates it from D.C., let alone Chicago.

Occasionally, a powerful image seeps through the hot air, for example, “She sucks on pain like a lollipop, she can’t get enough.” Often the way flashbacks weave in, ghostlike, with the present-day scenes is telling and deftly orchestrated. And the actors acquit themselves well, particularly Patrick Barrett as Jonah and Thomas Anawalt as Finn, declaiming the poetry with flair and music. …However. Character is too often left to the wayside, the scenes flying by too fast to get to know who these people are. Too much time is wasted on meaningless tangents (like the professor’s book and the brother’s dreams of an insect circus). The best moments – when I saw what the playwright was truly capable of, were, peculiarly enough, during flirtation scenes, when the poetry was traded for the multi-layered New York-y kind of sarcasm and self-deprecation that sounds like real coffeeshop conversation between real people.

I must admit some personal bias against realistic-plot/poetic-language plays; or rather, I rarely feel I see them done well. They are a modern genre unto themselves, wherein a slew of similar and usually twenty-something characters with defining quirks avoid expressing their true feelings about emotional events by engaging in stage poetry. What playwrights of such pieces too often miss, I believe, is that, in a play, the quality of the poetry alone is meaningless; what matters is that the characters have an emotional reason to say it the way they are saying it. That’s the guiding principle in all of Shakespeare; it’s what makes the plays of John Guare and August Wilson and Sheila Callaghan (most of the time) so great; but unfortunately for the talented members of Aporia Repertory Company, it’s a connection mostly lacking here.

See it if: You get interested in a play for what it’s trying to be, not what it is.

Skip it if: You don’t even like this type of play when it’s done better at Catalyst or Woolly.