Wow. So this is still going on, and I’d just like to say: I want some of what he’s smoking.

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.

Children of Medea
Studio Theatre - Stage 4

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.

Through the Looking Glass
The Shop at Fort Fringe

Remaining Performances:
Sunday, 7/13, 2 pm
Wednesday, 7/16; 8 pm
Sunday, 7/20, 8 pm

They say: “In this original adaptation of ‘Through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll, Alice travels back to Wonderland when tricked by her own reflection. Through creative movement and sound, the creatures of Wonderland haphazardly guide Alice on a tumultuous journey to get back through the looking glass.”

Ted’s take: In critiquing this production, one is likely to transgress the lines with which the play opens:

It shall not touch with breath of bale
The pleasance of our fairy tale.

Perhaps, one muses, they would have done better to open with a couplet from the epilogue:

Lingering onward dreamily
in an evening of July–

…which of course is what this production does, lingering onward so dreamily that its thirty-five minutes begin to feel more like the sixty with which the festival program credits them. That said, it is widely observed that one of Wonderland’s signature offerings is a reprieve from the flow of time—and so whatever quibbling breaths of bale I might offer are unlikely to sully the pleasance of this piece.

Omniumgatherum’s version of Wonderland boasts a reprieve from various other temporal fixtures–props and a set, to name two. The players serve as these, and as characters in a neatly minimalist evocation of the acentric, hallucinogenically alienating nature of the Other World. That otherworldliness establishes itself too in the lovely dissonant drone of the three flowers-turned-Weird-Sisters who befriend and befuddle Alice upon her emergence from the mirror and quickly teach her the lessons of Wonderland, where curiosity is punished, idiom is whipped, and trees become sexual predators.

Meanwhile, Alice charms, batting her blue-painted eyes (look carefully–they match her socks), and holding the audience rapt with the simple stuff (building a house of cards, staring at herself in the mirror). None of the players, however, corners the market on comic timing, and some decent scenes get overshadowed by some very high-schoolish gaffes: facing upstage, half-baked English accents, an episode or two of awkward shouting, and a great general shuffling about by way of…dance.

As Alice might say, “Curiouser and curiouser.”

See it if: You’re a sucker for lamé and tutus.

Skip it if: You consider Jefferson Airplane inadequate interpreters of Lewis Carroll.