Concord, Virginia: A Southern Town in Stories

Remaining Performances:
Jul 23rd, 7:30 pm
Jul 24th, 6 pm
Jul 25th, 6:30 pm
Jul 26th, 1 pm

They say: “Neofotis performs stories from his prize-winning book, newly published by St. Martin’s Press. With tales of night-swimming lovers, moon-shining old ladies, and gay trials, come witness the 28 year-old love child of Truman Capote and Eudora Welty! (NYC’s Next Magazine)”

Brian’s take: I’ll not mince words: Concord, Virginia, has too many words.

When I’m writing prose, I read my sentences aloud so that I can hear all the over-wrought language I need to banish from the pages. Here, as Peter Neofotis performs aloud two short stories about a small Virginia town, I couldn’t help but wish he’d taken a machete to his manuscript, pruning what are otherwise perfectly compelling stories of thorny phrases like, “She wistfully walked by,” “Helen pointedly replied,” and, thorniest of all, “They ambulated out the door.”

But the biggest problem with Concord, Virginia isn’t the amount of words, but rather its too-heavy reliance upon them instead of character. That’s not to say the characters aren’t periodically attention-grabbing, or even at points well-drawn; but generally, it was a challenge to tell them apart. Not until halfway through the first story did I know for sure which of several college students was testifying before the jury in a case of frat house sodomy. Neofotis’ ability to inhabit multiple distinct characters — already no simple task — is muddied by the energy he has to expend trudging through the narrative as artfully as possible. His characters would be fuller if each had his own relationship with language, his own truly distinct style of speech, and also his own desires for silence. A silence in the theater has huge potential to thrill and enchant. Unfortunately, Neofotis is simply doesn’t leave enough unsaid.

See it if: You don’t mind it when prose turns purple.

Skip it if: My review is already too many words for you to bear.

They Call Me Mister Fry

Remaining Performances:
July 25, 4 p.m.
July 26, 5 p.m.

They say: “Welcome Back Kotter vs. COPS, King Arthur vs. No Child Left Behind. Watch this suburban white boy from Indiana battle the students, the establishment, and himself in a South Central classroom. Laughter, tears and extra credit provided. A true story.”

Brian’s take: All right, so I walk out of They Call Me Mister Fry, and here’s my first thought: “Mister Fry Is The Patch Adams Of Education.” (It appears in my mind just like that, with all the capital letters.) Genius, isn’t it? I’m happy, I’m whistling, I’m skipping, I’m handing out Now and Laters to babies, I’ve got the first line of my review.

Not so fast. Turns out I wouldn’t be the first to make the Jack Freiberger-Robin Williams connection.

Shucks.

So besides a pedagogical Patch, or perhaps Mr. Fry, what shall I call Jack Freiberger, the cuddly and lovable protagonist of this one man show? How about a tearjerker, a laughmonger, or an “awwww”-squeezer. How about a man so endearing you almost want to see him orchestrate some kind of sick and depraved orgy during his lesson, just so you can accuse him of a flaw.

All right, maybe I wouldn’t call him that last thing. It was titillating enough to watch Fry’s classroom foibles as a neophyte fifth grade teacher, particularly his relationship with two problem students, Anthony and Jasmine. As Freiberger tosses his hands and grunts his yos, or clanks his knees and chomps his gum, the novelty of a white, middle-aged teacher standing in front of a room of people and imitating his Latino and black fifth grade inner-city students is magnified. Freiberger dares to play the kids’ stereotypical ticks for laughs, and at first this makes the impersonations a bit uncomfortable. But as his relationships with the students deepen, and the obstacles that confront them escalate, so do Freiberger’s characterizations undergo a sneaky metamorphosis: the belligerent Latino student who says “yo” every other word becomes an 11-year-old who speaks sign language and pulls a cappuccino out of his pocket while he’s in detention, and the nervous, gum-chewing daughter of a single mother becomes a confident — albeit still fatherless — young woman.

But here’s what Freiberger dramatizes most masterfully, and most intimately: that formative instant, which occurs in every child’s life (though earlier for kids with these kinds of troubled lives), when you realize that adults (your parents, your grandparents, your teachers, your Mister Fries) are more terrified of the big-bad-world than you are. It’s a devastating epiphany, and it’s Freiberger’s willingness to relive that moment with his students that makes They Call Me Mister Fry such a triumphant tragedy of self-recognition.

See it if: You liked Welcome Back Kotter and Boston Public, not to mention all those feel-good teaching shows in between.

Skip it if: You’d rather watch the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off marathon on TNT.

The Real Adventures of Tom Mix

Remaining Performances:
July 22, 6 p.m.
July 24, 8 p.m.
July 26, 1 p.m.

They say: “The glamour of Hollywood meets the glory of the Old West in the real life, death-defying adventures of Tom Mix, the first western movie star.”

Brian’s take: Your grandmother’s armpits. The British Open. An assortment of mildly fragrant cheeses. All of these things are wilder than the West portrayed in The Real Adventures of Tom Mix.

Here’s the gist: Tom Mix was one of the first famous Western movie stars. He made hundreds of films — the vast majority of them silent — and the creators of this play have apparently used letters and historical papers and whatnot to construct a monologue for an actor who rarely got to recite one.

A compelling idea, sure: giving voice to the voiceless. But good lord, give that voice something to say — and an hour’s worth of vaguely interesting biographical facts does not count.

Playing the character of Mix, at least as it’s currently written, is a thankless task to ask of Jack Tomalis — or any actor really. And Tomalis doesn’t show the character much love in return. In lieu of their voices, silent movie actors, by necessity, drew upon a deep and dynamic arsenal of expressions. Tomalis, on the other hand, draws upon approximately two — his Consternated Face, and his Wistful Face. I left The Real Adventures of Tom Mix wearing my own version of the former.

See it if: Your grandma’s armpits are unavailable.

Skip it if: Thinking of the Old West inspires your Wistful Face. This failed homage will turn your nostalgia to sadness.

The Lost Ones by Samuel Beckett

Remaining Performances:
July 15 at 8 p.m.
July 19 at 1:30 p.m.
July 23 at 7:15 p.m.
July 24 at 11:45 p.m.

They say: “Closely held. A Beckett gem. Rarely permitted to be played. With scores of tiny puppets, actor Carter Jahncke enacts a mesmerizing text. Beckett’s haunting vision reaches out, enfolds us in a chamber far outside, and deep within the mind.”

Brian’s take: You may want to take a cab home from The Lost Ones, an extended soliloquy so intoxicating that Carter Jahncke, who as The Aged One is the stage’s only breathing player, has to literally shake the scraggly character out of his body before he’s able to bow. Even after the self-exorcism he still seems a tad afflicted — like a shaman returning from a vision quest, or a child who has just seen his grandpa’s ghost.

What he has seen is a stark and abstract panorama of a society, culled from Samuel Beckett’s short story Le dépeupleur, and constructed for the stage with dozens of tiny human figurines (the non-breathing players) imprisoned inside an imaginary cylinder with a few ladders the only false promise of escape. The arbitrary paramaters of this cylindrical world both comfort and excruciate The Aged One, as he endeavors to describe them with painstaking specificity: the precise angle at which occupants of a certain station must lean; the direction one class of creature must walk, in perpetuity;  the hierarchy of preferences for the ascension and descension of ladders.  Meanwhile, the lilliputian dolls are fragile, frozen, and expressive, and Jahncke cultivates a disturbing rapport with them, relishing opportunities for manipulation, and dreading those moments when, crouching to inspect the figures, it becomes clear that they are created in his image.

Though immortalized as a playwright, Beckett was an accomplished novelist too. Still, he maintained a certain ambivalence towards prose — the fact that readers could close a book at their leisure bothered him. A theater, on the other hand, is an ingenious kind of cage, and Beckett reveled in the possibility that he could trap characters and audience members in there together.

Actors of Beckett, however, commonly find themselves trapped not behind the proscenium, but behind the language. Not Jahncke. He harnesses every twist and turn of a text that is, how shall I put this, not terribly limber. He avoids the frantic compulsion to chase after the words, instead allowing each new thought to creep up on him from behind, crafting a production with director Richard Henrich that, in addition to trapping character and audience, jointly startles, titillates, and terrifies them as well — a realization, rather than recitation, of Beckett’s vision.

See it if: You just don’t see the point of it all. This is the play for you.

Skip it if: You hyperventilate in enclosed spaces. You won’t last 10 minutes.

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 19 @ 5:00 pm
Sunday, July 20 @ 2:00 pm
Wednesday, July 23 @ 9:00 pm
Saturday, July 26 @ Noon

She says: “A story about immigration, alienation, language and meaning, different ways of killing and dying, donuts and ants. Four years after being abandoned by their mother, two Korean-American sisters struggle with growing up. One dreams of being Alice, but Wonderland ain’t no fairy tale. Medea could have told them that.”

Sheffy’s take: When Sue Jin Song is basking in fame and success as a world-famous playwright, I will proudly brag that I remember when CapFringe premiered her virgin play back in aught-eight. Song, a suburban DC-native actress returning from the stages and studios of NYC and LA, finds her voice and makes it sing in a drama about two sisters who have lost their mother and now struggle with their identities while coping with an overbearing, taciturn father. Actually, she finds multiple voices—the perspective of the younger sister who refuses to grow up and accept responsibility, the perspective of the older sister who had responsibility thrust upon her at age 13, as she was expected to be the mother as well as the immaculate daughter. By staging in the round, the effect of multiple perspectives is further magnified by the audience.

In a story pregnant with literary metaphors ranging from Greek drama to the motherless Peter Pan who refuses to grow up, Song builds on the pathos of Medea, a princess, but also an immigrant, forced to take fateful actions when abandoned by her lover. Although the press kit (press kit!?) requested that I not spoil the plot, it was Song’s lyrical narration and dynamic acting that captivated me. As the older sister struggles for balance in her life, we meet her alter-ego who must navigate wonderland when the walls of pressure and responsibility start collapsing in. Sure, everyone needs an alter-ego every now and then, but I have to admit, I wasn’t sure how escaping to a surreal world contributed to the play’s resolution. The blurry line between her reality and fantasy obfuscated some of the plot’s intricacies.

After sweltering in other cramped, uncomfortable Fringe venues, it’s refreshing to enjoy a dedicated theater space. However, access to an arsenal of colored lights and a light board is not license to make the show feel like a rock concert. With accents, tone, and mannerisms, Song is clearly talented enough to embody each character without the help of personalized light motifs.

See it if: You love your mother.

Skip it if: You’re a budding female playwright and dramatic solo performer but you can’t handle new competition in town.