Philly Fringe 2018: maura ampersand doug presents Doug Williams's 'Bon Iver Fights a Bear'

Williams and director Maura Krause, both of the playwriting collective Orbiter 3, have transformed the basement at the Art Church of West Philadelphia into a secluded forest idyll, complete with woodchip-strewn floor and hazy, crepuscular lighting, with scenic and lighting design credited to the actors (as emily ampersand doug). The small audience, sitting close to the makeshift playing space, can almost feel the icy winds that infect the Upper Midwest air in deepest winter.

This kind of atmosphere seems tailor-made for mythmaking. Justin, played with delicious hipster ennui by singer-songwriter Emily Schuman, pines for his lost girlfriend, his lost band, and the life he left behind in North Carolina. He spends his days gambling online and watching DVDs of Northern Exposure. Any viewer of that show will know where his adopted moniker comes from.

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Although Schuman occasionally dons a guitar and offers music from Bon Iver’s heralded, self-produced debut album For Emma, Forever Ago, Williams and Krause show little interest in chronicling the business of becoming a musician. And with good reason: that story has been told, growing into a cliché all its own. Rather, they have some fun drawing Justin as a whiny, rudderless manchild who retreats from a world he cannot handle.

They also present Bon Iver’s creation myth as a hero’s journey; that’s where the bear comes in. Dressed in an endearingly homemade-looking fuzzy costume (the program lists no designer, but kudos nonetheless), Doug Greene enters the scene as a depressed, self-conscious, slowly starving bruin. His personality and experience mirror Justin’s. Both feel they’ve let their fathers down, and occupy the majority of their time struggling to survive.

Greene charms the audience through a series of direct-address monologues, delivered in the manner of a sad-sack standup comic. He sometimes seems more perceptive to human emotions than the beardo sitting five feet away, slipping deeper into depression.

The bear knows he must act as the catalyst for Justin to find himself, a project that produces regular laughs and plenty of pathos. Krause deserves credit for layering this odd-couple relationship with palpable humanity.

But the longer you spend hanging around a grizzly, the more you realize how much of life is eat or be eaten. Williams lovingly pokes fun at Bon Iver, but it’s also clear the playwright adores his subject; the 70-minute work finishes sweetly on a note of survival and rebirth. I guess the only way out is through the stomach of a bear.