"Freedom Club' and Fugard's "Statements' at the Fringe (1st rev

Two lovers in apartheid-era South Africa— one white, one black— sneak inside an underused library (like I said, realism) each night to violate that regime's laws against interracial fornication. After 20 minutes of pillow talk filled with allusions to a common humanity in a discussion of evolutionary theory, a policeman bangs on the door. The remainder of Athol Fugard's Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act consists of the pair's statements made after the arrest.

Unfortunately for Fugard—and for Philadelphia Fringe audiences— his insightful, poetic text receives little reciprocated virtue from DysFUNctional Theater's production. Neither of the two lovers (Ruchama Bilenky and Brandon Sloan) infuses the early lines with proper poignancy. And though Sloan finishes strong in his "statements" monologue, novice director Janet Bressler fails to navigate the play's emotional transitions, nor does she gets much help from James Jackson's bleak lighting design.

John Wilkes Booth, rock star

On the other hand, the first half of Freedom Club employs the sort of theatrics that political plays need to overcome their reputation for boring preachiness. Adriano Shaplin's text plops us down in 1863, where the angry John Wilkes Booth plots his revenge for his ravaged Confederacy by assassinating Abraham Lincoln.

In this collaboration between New Paradise Laboratories and The Riot Group, Jeb Kreager's Booth prowls the stage like a rock star teeming with the rage of a caged lion. In a mythic, hallucinatory portrayal, Kreager fires off lines like, "America: You need an actor to save you," as he plots with confederates, seduces Senators' daughters, and battles his family over their apolitical allegiance to the stage. Kreager's admirable aggressiveness evokes laughter even when he's crying out for a new tea party and mocking Gandhi's "Be the change you wish to see in the world."

Shaplin's script steals inspiration from 1980s action flicks lines ("If Jesus Christ were here, he would torch this place with a flamethrower") that intentionally stand out from the otherwise pitched poetry of his text. And by portraying Lincoln as a whiny depressive whose splitting of the Union continues to divide America today, he forces us to re-examine Lincoln's hallowed legacy.

Feminist plotters

A maddening orgiastic excitement escalates right up to the assassination; then the action freezes on the gunshot, Maria Shaplin's night club lighting fades into a slow burn, and the action flies forward to 2015, where it suddenly and inexplicably becomes boring without the redeeming virtue of ridiculousness.

Act II, which finds a pack of feminist rebels plotting revenge like Booth in a post-Obama wilderness, gave us none of director Whit MacLaughlin's signature theatrics— the mind-bending visuals and intense soundscapes, the frenetic pace and vivid choreography. Instead, the seven actors stood at the front of the stage to speak their lines in a presentational format— lines devoid of Shaplin's first-half wit and bombast. Here Freedom Club degenerates into a bumbling Turner Diaries of the lunatic left.♦


To read another review of Freedom Club by Jonathan M. Stein, click here.