"Annihilation Point' at Fringe Festival

When the apocalypse comes, we'll all go down laughing with the cast of The Annihilation Point, who again came through at this year's Fringe Festival with a hilarious mix of science fiction/horror show farce, orchestrated with the Time Mender company's usual unbridled lunacy. This group of talented physical comedy actors and writers (playwright Tim Sawicki and actors Bradley Wrenn, Justin Jain and Dave Johnson) previously brought us the Fringe festival comedy hits, The Giant Squid (2008) and The Jersey Devil (2007). This year they were assisted by director Dan Rothenberg (moonlighting from Pig Iron Theater) and Genevieve Perrier (as the voice of Mrs. Computer).

The late night audience entered the basement of the Wolf Building on North 12th Street through a maze of white-suited investigators spraying us out of bottles marked "X" and "Y" in order to prepare us as Repopulation Candidates so that we might save humanity by being time-jumped into the future "after Xenocide." It reminded my photographer companion of the times he spent navigating spaces in China through the recent SARS epidemic.

Soon Astronaut Z (Wrenn), his cyborg sidekick Dr. Ro-bert Doomstache (Johnson) and Lt. Gregory Tamborski (Jain), an alien adviser, fly into a hectic array of fast-paced and unpredictable scenes that generate almost continuous laughter. Science fiction and doom have never had such a jolly anarchic ride as this crew created.

An inventive set and lighting design (by Lisi Stoessel and Sawicki) exploited the decayed foreboding of the building's underground space, with its large columns and exposed plumbing, adding a time capsule, a mega-computer (housing the voice of Perrier, who provided the measured center amid the chaos around her tailored circuitry), and a video-lit alcove where we could glimpse into ever more manic future lives. This group is ready for the majors.