In the upper recesses of Fort Fringe is a room where Jack Torrance could have very well hacked someone to death with an axe. So naturally, the good folks at the Capital Fringe Festival saw it as an ideal space to put on plays.

Shot and edited by Matt Bevilacqua.

Remaining Performances:
Friday, July 24 @
5:45 p.m.
Saturday, July 25 @ 11:45 p.m.

They say: “This is play is scar from my head through my heart to my crotch. It’s a Greek chorus wrapped inside a romantic tragedy. There is also some moments of comedy and a compulsion to move via dance yoga and/or tai chi contained within it. A tornado in the rodeo of love and obsession. With meditations on the power of positive thinking. A shogun mystery choreopoem. Unraveling samskaric imprints.” [Note: I typed exactly what was in the Fringe Guide. Exactly.]

Hilary’s take: “I don’t get it,” says K, as D and M (or maybe it was T?) pantomime their pants off, clawing at their waistlines and collars. “I don’t get it!”

That’s exactly how I felt the entire 45 minutes of Stephen Forrest Notes’ “tornado in the rodeo of love and obsession.” I weathered the storm but walked out of Fort Fringe unamazed and confused. I think the gist of the play is this: Boy meets local “it” girl and becomes obsessed with her powerful sexual energy. But this woman is not powerful at all; she is vulnerable, needy even. But she doesn’t need him. Each is searching for a fulfilment the other is painfully ill-equipped to provide.

In the end, I’m not really sure what happens, and I don’t really care. The main problem with Notes’ play is that it’s damn near impossible to figure out who’s who—what distinguishes M from T?—which means I can’t bring myself to care about their thoughts/feelings/actions in each of the convoluted, pseudo-postmodern vignettes. (That might say more about the acting than the writing, but I’ll never know for sure.) And you can forget about context clues—the only props consisted of little more than jester hats, potty-mouthed sock puppets, and an apple.

The play is a clusterfuck of ideas, and perhaps the acting was a little sub par because the performers had to unload so much other garbage (yoga, tai chi, awkward lesbian kisses, wordy monologues…) in addition to the galumphing (lack of) plot points. As the lights went up and AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” (music selection warrants an entirely separate critique) cut through the audience’s baffled silence, I just kept thinking “WTF? W. T. F.”

See it if: Hearing that the playwright studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics sounds like a plus.

Skip it if: Watching someone (maybe D?) devour an apple wayyy too emotionally for five inexplicable minutes—chewing through tears, laughs… pain(?)— isn’t exactly your idea of high art, or good theater. And if while you were reading On The Road you thought to yourself, “Hey, this Kerouac guy could really use fewer drugs and more editing.”

Remaining Performances:
Wednesday, July 22, 2009 @ 9:15 pm
Saturday, July 25, 2009 @ 11:30 am

They say: Emily figured it out: run away to France, meet the perfect guy, leave everyone behind. But, upon her homecoming, to be the maid-of-honor at her mother’s fifth wedding, it becomes glaringly obvious — this is NOT her life.

Suzyn’s take: This is NOT a fun evening at the theater.

What gets me is that the playwright knows the problem.  He writes in the program that his script is full of “stupid, selfish asses.”   However, it is really hard to make a play about “stupid selfish asses” work—to say nothing of a musical.

Comedy wherein all the characters are jerks, no one is sympathetic and the real point is to sneer at everybody can be done well.  Indeed, plenty of sneering occurred in the audience as the obviously self-centered characters sung about how “Just for one day, I’d like to see…the whole world revolve around me.”  But the fun of most musicals is getting caught up in the joy or the drama and letting your emotions take you away, and that just doesn’t combine well with sneering.

The songs are well-written, though not all of them advance the plot and the cast is going to get a cease-and-desist from Bryan Adams one day. McKenzie Walsh as “Rebecca Romaine” can really sing, though I look forward to going the rest of my life without hearing “Not like the actress, like the lettuce” again.   It was one of several jokes that didn’t improve on endless repetition.

It’s easy to blame the playwright, and I do, but really someone in the cast should have said: “Hey, my character is a total cliché, and so is everyone else’s, and we all whine a lot, even interrupting a wedding to do so. And the daughter’s friends are the mother’s wedding attendants with no explanation.  And Emily slaps Sean’s ass while the audience probably still thinks he’s her brother.  And the ‘perfect boyfriend’ kisses his way up Mom’s arm for no reason.  And if we’re going to write a song full of Yo Momma jokes, shouldn’t we at least use funny ones?”

This could have been prevented, y’all.

See it if:  “I love wedding cake like a fat kid loves…regular cake” does it for you in the humor department.

Skip it if:  It doesn’t.

Remaining Performances:
Sunday, July 19th at 6:45 p.m.; Thursday, July 23 at 5:30 p.m.;  Saturday, July 25th at 4:30 p.m.; Sunday, July 26th at 2:15 p.m.

They say: “A World War II hero, his daughter and Vietnam veteran son confront the secrets that haunt and divide them. This powerful new drama, lightened with laughter, was inspired by the author’s father, whose war diary she discovered after his death.

Glen’s Take:  ”Emerging” local playwright Susan Austin Roth is a well-known and highly successful writer of gardening books, so should you see other reviews of Missing Pages busting out a lot of cheap gardening puns, you’ll know why.  Not here, though.  No, faithful F and P reader, here you will find no references to grafting, cutting or pruning;  that is my solemn vow.

A play that revolves around Alzheimer’s has a tough row to hoe.

Senile dementia is characterized by repetition, and that needs to be conveyed; one of Roth’s subjects, here, is the frustration that accompanies caring for aging parent.  For that frustration to register, we have to feel a bit of what is felt by her characters, doting Charlotte (Lynn-Jane Foreman) and taciturn Vietnam vet Andy (Joe Peck) as they struggle to deal with George, their alternately sweet and belligerent father (Robert Leembruggen).

That their father repeats himself so often is dramaturgically fraught, because in drama, repetition good, repetitiveness bad.  Those  moments when Leembruggen’s proud WWII-vet becomes lucid enought to chastise his son for being a deserter, coward and traitor feel real, all right, but they don’t move – they hit such similar dramatic beats that it begins to feel as if whole scenes have been cut-and-pasted throughout the script.

That would be a bigger problem if Leembruggen weren’t so appealing an actor — and one confident enough to convey George’s disease without broad, movie-of-the-week strokes.

Roth is on to something, here; she’s crafted some interesting parallels between father and son.  At this point, she’s still pushing them at us instead of letting us find them, which which is why, I think, the scene in which one of the father’s WWII memories combines with the son’s ‘Nam flashbacks feels as needless and over-the-top as it does.

Director Diana Denley tries to make it work, and is elsewhere quite nimble at the kind of low-fi stagecraft Fringe demands, but it’s no use.

Even so, Roth’s ending is satisfying and legitimately moving. Once her script loses its rhetorical training wheels, and she excises from her dialogue the kind of pre-digested bits of language more apt to crop up on TV than in real life (viz: “And what about what I need?” “He’s your father, too!” and “I know, Dad. I know.”) Missing Pages will be get leaner, tighter, and more effective.  If this current Fringe staging feels a litle shaggy and unkempt, well [GARDENING REFERENCE REDACTED.]

See it if:  You approach Fringe like a theater workshop, and are looking to discover a serious, rough but promising work.

Skip it if: You approach Fringe like last call at Camelot. (Woo!  Boobies!)  Or the phrase “My war was different than your war” sets off alarm bells.

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 11 at 2 p.m.
Saturday, July 18 at 10 pm.
Wednesday, July 22 at 7 p.m.
Friday, July 24 at 7:30 p.m.

They say: “Lock five playwrights in oversized compost bins, and demand plays about the expanding ‘green’ movement. What do you get? Mountains of compost, five smelly playwrights, and a Fringe Festival entry. Come explore the sad truth: It’s Not Easy Being Green.”

Hilary’s take: There are no oversized compost bins or playwrights onstage. In fact, “they say” nothing about the production’s actual content. Here’s what they should’ve said: “Lock a sold out audience in steamy Redrum to absorb one shaky modern dance and four didactic sketches by five (smelly?) playwrights. What do you get? Bludgeoned by morality and a surprise sales pitch in our attempt to expand the ‘green’ movement.”

That said, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend exploring It’s Not Easy Being Green. For the simple truth that it is easy, very easy, to be ‘green’, despite what the forced conflict of each of the four allegories would mislead one to believe (I’m not even gonna touch that modern dance). In Manifesto, playwright Catherine O’Connor conjures an artist (Q. Terah Jackson) who’s written the titular declaration of his desire to destroy all his material goods to “radically recontextualize the consumer experience.” As his gallery-provided assistant films the “art” happening, a homeless man (a superb Slice Hicks) confronts the stripped down artist and his binned $3,000 leather jacket. What ensues is the first of the production’s de rigueur didactic verbal spars, wherein the assumed-to-be-clueless audience is taught to value action over ideation in matters of the planet.

In sketches Driving Green, by Martin Blank, and Use Unknown, by Ali Watson, global warming wreaks havoc on humanity — one couple in a Prius and all of human kind, respectively. But Ben Kingsland’s Trash Talk, about an anthropomorphic garbage can and recycling bin kicked to the curb too early for pick up, was by far the best sketch. In the best performances of the evening, Carolyn Sagatov plays the bad girl trash can to Mary C. Davis’s goody-goody ‘green’ shoes. Shortly after the playground put-downs commence — “You stink!” — the ladies find common ground: a mutual “thing” for Compost Pile. “He’s so down to earth!”

Although the acting was stiff in a few spots, and all the conclusions of the allegories-cum-fables predictable from the moment that rhapsodic street sweeper twirled across the stage (seriously, modern dance = out of my tolerance league), I never once thought about walking out. My mind didn’t even wander to what drinks I’d order afterward, or how my laundry needs doing, &c. Despite this trite treatment of the ‘green’ theme, the the parochial production held my critical attention. Sure, I was stewing over the painfully half-assed conflicts and deus ex machina-like logical conclusions the whole time. But I was mentally engaged nonetheless. And to me, that’s the hallmark of good theater.

See it if: You know nothing about the ‘green’ movement and are “kinda curious, I guess,” you enjoy constant reaffirming of your moral high ground after purchasing a Prius, or you’re looking for a tepid yet socially conscious fringe show to attend with your child.

Skip it if: You don’t enjoy surprise sales pitches, no matter if the outdoorsman-turned-eco building materials expert whips out a blow torch and melts metal in his bare, outstretched hand. (Be forewarned: At the end of each show, Journeymen invite an eco ‘expert’ for a 10-minute lecture on how you can do your part to save the planet. Last night, Keith Ware from Eco-Green Living tried to sell us ceramic insulation, and roofing as thin as a dime!)