UNcontentED Love

The Shop at Fort Fringe
607 New York Avenue, NW.

Remaining Performances:

Saturday, July 17 at 5:30 p.m.
Sunday, July 18 at 11:00 p.m.
Saturday, July 24 at 9:30 p.m.

They say: “Exposing the darker side of relationships through physical poetry: scenes between lovers, spouses and rivals; love thrown off by rejection, jealousy, misunderstanding, insecurity, and broken promises; with perhaps a hint of hope for reconciliation. This is not Shakespeare in Love.”

Matt’s Take: It’s more than a little cynical to wonder if any signs of fresh life can be injected into the bloated carcass of the Bard, a man whose works have already been re-imagined so often that even post-post-modern interpretations feel familiar. Enter UNcontentED Love (its creative spelling speaks volumes), which is neither a linear re-telling nor an obtuse experimentation but a rather frenetic and generally confusing cut-and-paste amalgam that tries to connect the dots between Shakespeare’s tragic oeuvre.

Initially conceived as a piece with a cast of five actresses, here it is presented with an all-signing cast comprised of (mostly) Gallaudet Univeristy students. An intriguing idea, to be sure. Yet UNcontentED Love‘s disjointedness stems from a host of logistical difficulties that can hardly be chalked up to its intended message being lost in translation.

Predicated on exploring the “darker side of relationships” through the lens of Shakespeare’s most memorable fatalists, we watch his most famous creations flirt, stab, and betray their way through snippets in which the audience is offered no identification of character or plot, just a few objects that intersect scenes. Are they performing Othello now? Why are some people wearing costumes while others prance in leggings? Was that guy in the gold lame American Apparel tank top supposed to be Cleopatra? Wait, what?

The cast brings an extreme physicality to the performance, exuding a breakneck intensity that is both inspiring and dizzying to watch. (Personally, I could have done without all of the gnarly thrusting and dry humping but these are the types of flourishes that Fringe provides.) But even with its laudable intensity, UNcontentED Love’s best moments came when the narration was abandoned and the action performed in silence. These moments also served as a much-needed reprieve for the unfortunate actors tasked with vocalizing the Shakespearean verse being signed while performing. (Could no one else have pitched in to help these two?) It was only then, without the clunky distractions, that UNContentED Love didn’t feel like just another idea transposed onto deaf actors but rather a performance that spoke for itself.

See it: If you’ve always wanted to see a Capulet in a jumper.

Skip it if: You’re already comfortable with the understanding that relationships in Shakespeare’s plays do not end well.

Not the Macbeth in question.

Double, double, toil and trouble!

Um.

My favorite telescope is Hubble?

If you’re reading this, odds are fair you know the widely-held superstition among theater-folk that Shakespeare’s shortest, spookiest play –”the Scottish play,” as skittish actors say it, the one about the Thane of Cawdor — is bad news. Simply to take part in a production of the show for which the nickname Mackers is not some cutesy appellation but in a fact a curse-repelling euphemism is, some believe, to tempt fate.

But then, in performance of said play is the only way one may speak aloud the dread name MacBeth inside the confines of a theater without inviting some awful calamity.

As with any legend, there are variations on the rules: As I type this at the Baldacchino Gypsy Tent, an actor is trying to tell me the curse applies only to performers who have appeared in the show. Dude, curses are not administered by the IRS!  The Weird Sisters are no respecters of fine print!  Beware!

Well.  You say tah-MAY-toe, I say “the Scottish play.”

What happened at yesterday’s performance of PushPull Theater Company’s Capoeira-enhanced MacBeth was not nearly as bad as, say, a supernaturally-instigated, powerlust-driven assassination spree. But it was still pretty bizarre.

A tardy ticketholder for the 4 p.m. performance at Fort Fringe’s “Redrum” space took extreme exception to being told the show had begun and there was no late seating. As CapFringe honcho Julianne Brienza tells it, the fellow, a man of “45 or 50,” well past the age when such violent excitability might be excused, ran past the venue manger, ripped the door from its hinges, and seated himself for the remainder of the show which, naturally, went on.

Alerted via a text-message, Brienza assembled a posse of five other CapFringe staffers, including vice chair Dan Costello, and confronted the door-ripper as he exited the Redrum.  She offered him a deal: If he agreed to pay for the repairs, the matter would end there.  No one would call in the law, and the door-ripper would even be welcome at subsequent CapFringe performances and events. The fellow agreed and stood by while festival staff made a quick assessment of the damage, then walked downstairs to the box office and charged the door-ripper’s credit card for a cool $150.

The mysterious door-ripper’s parting words? “He said, ‘This has been an experience,’” reports Brienza. “I feel bad that I never asked him if he liked the show.”

Remaining Performances:

Saturday, 7/12, 2 pm
Sunday, 7/20, 2 pm
Saturday, 7/26, 7:30 pm

They say: “In the Rude Mechanicals’ Coriolanus – Man of the People by William Shakespeare, the seldom-performed play is reinterpreted (and trimmed) for a modern audience into a sharp satire about politics and politicians. No establishment is left unlampooned, from the politicians, lobbyists and media – to the followers they manipulate.”

Chris’s take: In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck derisively labels the amateur actors rehearsing to perform for Theseus “a crew of patches, rude mechanicals,” which is to say a bunch of clownish, ignorant workingmen. The plentiful small theater companies that name themselves the “Rude Mechanicals” probably do so recalling the pleasant mayhem of Pyramus and Thisby, and overlooking the mechanicals’ sheer theatrical ineptitude.

The Laurel-based Rude Mechanicals bill their production of Coriolanus as “A Contemporary Satire by William Shakespeare.” Hmm. The thing about satires is that they ridicule institutions and individuals, and that they’re funny. The impulse behind this production was evidently to use Coriolanus to poke fun at the Bush administration. Thus, the citizens up in arms over corn prices carry placards with suspiciously contemporary slogans such as “No Blood for Corn”; Coriolanus speaks in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner; and naturally there are color-coded threat indicators. Sadly, this is the full extent of the “contemporary satire,” which is neither particularly insightful nor apt.

By inference, the director has come up with one gimmick (set the play in the present day) and in so doing didn’t bother to stage the play in a way that genuinely offers an interpretation of the story. In other words, through thoughtful direction, the production might have conveyed that because they blow with the wind, it’s actually the fickle citizens who are most responsible for the political meltdown, or it might have conveyed that Coriolanus is a man genuinely reluctant to pursue power who finds himself in a situation he could not have imagined, or even that he is genuinely a tyrant who deserves his death.

Instead, what we mostly get is an hour and 20 minutes of actors saying their lines, and making their entrances and exits. There are worse things, but there are better things too.

The acting is uneven. Alan Duda plays Coriolanus with military stoicism (think Vladimir Putin with more hair) but without any enlightening nuance. The finest actor, the one whose words flow trippingly on the tongue, is Mike Galizia as patrician Menenius Agrippa. Some of the actors in lesser roles are genuinely miserable. The staging is extremely minimal, which in itself is not a complaint. What is a complaint–and perhaps not the company’s fault–is that the stage creaks constantly, a palpable distraction.

The production ultimately comes across not as a satire, but as an accidental stage adaptation of a late-night, cable B-movie. There are lots of guys wearing fatigues and berets, explosions (if you can call bursts from a fog machine explosions, that is), guns (plastic, of course, and proportioned for children rather than adult actors), gunfire (recorded sound effects), and cheesy synthesized underscoring. As with the original mechanicals, the effect achieved is something other than the effect intended.

See it if: You are a Shakespeare enthusiast. Productions of Coriolanus just don’t come along every day.

Skip it if: You thought this would be played as satire.