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Fringe Festival 2007
Steve Cohen
Fringe Festival 2007:
Some hits among the misses
STEVE COHEN
A year ago I wrote a negative critique of the Philly Fringe Festival. I do not take back a word of that article. But this year I found several worthwhile attractions. Clearly, some of the 1500 participating artists are talented and serious professionals investing enough effort in their work to succeed in the marketplace.
One of these is Erin Wolf, whose Mush Mouth Productions presented four one-act plays on the subject of customer service, titled Can I Talk to a Manager? Wolf exudes the gamin cuteness of Sarah Jessica Parker and she can write, direct and perform comedy. Two of the playlets are written by Wolf herself. Her appearance in the cast of Drunk as a young woman in the manic stage of getting wasted was one of the highlights of recent Fringe Festivals. Other notable moments in Wolf’s writing: a riff on the squareness of people from Idaho, and a wicked put-down of religious zealots.
Hispanic feminist lesbian with an agenda
The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium presented four very short plays by Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco and Durang, called Four of a Kind, at the Café L’Etage on the corner of Sixth and Bainbridge. Beckett’s Come and Go presents three girlfriends with secrets; it’s cryptic, mysterious and brief. My favorite, Pinter’s Trouble in the Works, portrays a hilarious confrontation between a Yorkshire factory owner and a complaining employee. Ionesco’s Foursome puts three stubborn men through verbal gymnastics. Christopher Durang’s For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls is a parody of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, with Tina Brock particularly effective as Amanda and Dylan Clements delightfully snippy as her crippled son. Excellent casting and direction of all by Brock.
The avant garde playwright Maria Irene Fornes says she’s proud to be a Hispanic, feminist lesbian; but when she writes, she says, she is none of those. Maybe, but her Mud, as presented by a new group called Wandering Rom Players, shows a victim being abused by the two men in her life, so it’s hard to shake off the impression that Fornes had an agenda. Megan Hoke brought a radiance to her role, illuminating an otherwise depressing story in a stifling domestic setting. The script has many gripping moments, handled well by Hoke, Robert DaPonte and Joe Canuso. Director Brenna Geffers made skillful use of freeze-frame whiteouts at scene changes.
What’s Fringe? What’s Live Arts?
Better-known companies are presented in what’s called the Live Arts Festival that runs concurrently with the Fringe. As far as audiences are concerned, this is a difference without a distinction, except that, with Live Arts, you’re more likely to know the company’s track record before you buy a ticket. Established theater companies with their own buildings— like the Walnut, Wilma, Arden and Philadelphia Theatre Company— don’t participate. But this annual event gives homeless companies a chance to pick an unusual venue and benefit from the overall advertising and promotion.
A good example is Pig Iron Theatre, which has established a fine reputation for site-specific, viscerally arresting productions over its 12-year history. This year Pig Iron chose a former warehouse near Second and Girard called the Ice Box for a drama set in a morgue. Its Isabella, an interpretation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, is a stunning achievement.
This sounds a little too familiar
Another example is Eleventh-Hour Theater, a company that impressed me last season when it performed (not at the Fringe) tick, tick...Boom by Jonathan Larson and a send-up of Shakespeare called The Bomb-itty of Errors. As part of this year’s Live Arts Festival, the group produced Six of One, a musical that, judging from its prospectus, seemed to echo Larson’s theme of a songwriter turning 30 with an additional nod to the Sondheim classic, Company. Here were six friends— three guys, three gals— facing the problems of that life-cycle change.
Unfortunately, Six of One suffers from a plot that’s uncomfortably reminiscent of William Finn’s "Marvin" musicals, In Trousers and Falsettos. A married guy becomes infatuated with another man and leaves his wife. When that man compares himself to Columbus and sings "Set Sail, Columbus," composer Paul Loesel and book writer Scott Burkel veer close to plagiarism, because Finn’s 1978 song "Set Those Sails" from In Trousers uses similar words and draws the same analogy. Six of One also includes a song describing a wacky Thanksgiving dinner that’s too similar to Finn’s "How Marvin Eats His Breakfast" from In Trousers.
The performances by a well-chosen and likable cast were excellent, and direction by Megan Nicole O’Brien was professionally efficient. But the play is too long– almost three hours– and too derivative.
Spirit of a Polish iconoclast
A dance-piece, Several Witty Observations (á la Gombrowicz) by Dada von Bzdülöw Theatre came from Kracow, Poland. Author Witold Gombrowicz's words are not quoted, but his iconoclastic spirit is. There's wit in the clever contrast of forms— classic ballet, jazz, Greek tragedy, athleticism— often within the same scene. Two exceptional performances: A burly, bald guy with a belly shimmies with loosey-goosey grace, displaying the most individual dance personality I’ve seen in years; an intense, slender man looks perpetually troubled as he makes spectacular moves. Joined by a woman, they enact a variety of relationships with originality accompanied by an electronic score with some jazz riffs. I couldn't discern an overarching story, but that's the point of Dada, isn’t?
Mum Puppettheatre paid homage to the history of its art in Europe in The Fantoccini Brothers Return. The earliest vignette is based on a 1917 performance by the influential Russian painter Nina Efimova, while contemporary segments are written and directed by Aaron Cromie and Robert Smythe. Dave Johnson, Genevieve Perrier and Bradley K. Wrenn are talented actor/puppeteers who use a variety of formats that are surprisingly different from one another.
Two works-in-progress, Flamingo/Winnebago and Wandering Alice, are clever and original and deserve more detailed discussion (which I’ll give them in separate articles).
Emperor Jones disappoints
The festival’s biggest disappointment came courtesy of a professional company from New York, the Wooster Group. Eugene O’Neill’s early (1920) play, The Emperor Jones, is dated and rife with racial stereotypes; somehow, this company thought it could succeed with a production that accentuates the offensive elements.
A white woman with corked black face (Kate Volk) portrays the American black ex-con who convinces a West Indian island population that he possesses god-like powers. She delivers his lines in a sing-song parody of Southern Negro dialect while the white cockney accomplice, Smithers, is directed to mumble most of his lines off-stage. The parodist approach illuminates nothing, and deprives the work of any character development, pathos or involving drama.
Ari Fliakos was indecipherable as Smithers and Volk was loud as Jones. Elizabeth LeCompte directed. To what end?
To read other reviews of The Emperor Jones, click
Some hits among the misses
STEVE COHEN
A year ago I wrote a negative critique of the Philly Fringe Festival. I do not take back a word of that article. But this year I found several worthwhile attractions. Clearly, some of the 1500 participating artists are talented and serious professionals investing enough effort in their work to succeed in the marketplace.
One of these is Erin Wolf, whose Mush Mouth Productions presented four one-act plays on the subject of customer service, titled Can I Talk to a Manager? Wolf exudes the gamin cuteness of Sarah Jessica Parker and she can write, direct and perform comedy. Two of the playlets are written by Wolf herself. Her appearance in the cast of Drunk as a young woman in the manic stage of getting wasted was one of the highlights of recent Fringe Festivals. Other notable moments in Wolf’s writing: a riff on the squareness of people from Idaho, and a wicked put-down of religious zealots.
Hispanic feminist lesbian with an agenda
The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium presented four very short plays by Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco and Durang, called Four of a Kind, at the Café L’Etage on the corner of Sixth and Bainbridge. Beckett’s Come and Go presents three girlfriends with secrets; it’s cryptic, mysterious and brief. My favorite, Pinter’s Trouble in the Works, portrays a hilarious confrontation between a Yorkshire factory owner and a complaining employee. Ionesco’s Foursome puts three stubborn men through verbal gymnastics. Christopher Durang’s For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls is a parody of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, with Tina Brock particularly effective as Amanda and Dylan Clements delightfully snippy as her crippled son. Excellent casting and direction of all by Brock.
The avant garde playwright Maria Irene Fornes says she’s proud to be a Hispanic, feminist lesbian; but when she writes, she says, she is none of those. Maybe, but her Mud, as presented by a new group called Wandering Rom Players, shows a victim being abused by the two men in her life, so it’s hard to shake off the impression that Fornes had an agenda. Megan Hoke brought a radiance to her role, illuminating an otherwise depressing story in a stifling domestic setting. The script has many gripping moments, handled well by Hoke, Robert DaPonte and Joe Canuso. Director Brenna Geffers made skillful use of freeze-frame whiteouts at scene changes.
What’s Fringe? What’s Live Arts?
Better-known companies are presented in what’s called the Live Arts Festival that runs concurrently with the Fringe. As far as audiences are concerned, this is a difference without a distinction, except that, with Live Arts, you’re more likely to know the company’s track record before you buy a ticket. Established theater companies with their own buildings— like the Walnut, Wilma, Arden and Philadelphia Theatre Company— don’t participate. But this annual event gives homeless companies a chance to pick an unusual venue and benefit from the overall advertising and promotion.
A good example is Pig Iron Theatre, which has established a fine reputation for site-specific, viscerally arresting productions over its 12-year history. This year Pig Iron chose a former warehouse near Second and Girard called the Ice Box for a drama set in a morgue. Its Isabella, an interpretation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, is a stunning achievement.
This sounds a little too familiar
Another example is Eleventh-Hour Theater, a company that impressed me last season when it performed (not at the Fringe) tick, tick...Boom by Jonathan Larson and a send-up of Shakespeare called The Bomb-itty of Errors. As part of this year’s Live Arts Festival, the group produced Six of One, a musical that, judging from its prospectus, seemed to echo Larson’s theme of a songwriter turning 30 with an additional nod to the Sondheim classic, Company. Here were six friends— three guys, three gals— facing the problems of that life-cycle change.
Unfortunately, Six of One suffers from a plot that’s uncomfortably reminiscent of William Finn’s "Marvin" musicals, In Trousers and Falsettos. A married guy becomes infatuated with another man and leaves his wife. When that man compares himself to Columbus and sings "Set Sail, Columbus," composer Paul Loesel and book writer Scott Burkel veer close to plagiarism, because Finn’s 1978 song "Set Those Sails" from In Trousers uses similar words and draws the same analogy. Six of One also includes a song describing a wacky Thanksgiving dinner that’s too similar to Finn’s "How Marvin Eats His Breakfast" from In Trousers.
The performances by a well-chosen and likable cast were excellent, and direction by Megan Nicole O’Brien was professionally efficient. But the play is too long– almost three hours– and too derivative.
Spirit of a Polish iconoclast
A dance-piece, Several Witty Observations (á la Gombrowicz) by Dada von Bzdülöw Theatre came from Kracow, Poland. Author Witold Gombrowicz's words are not quoted, but his iconoclastic spirit is. There's wit in the clever contrast of forms— classic ballet, jazz, Greek tragedy, athleticism— often within the same scene. Two exceptional performances: A burly, bald guy with a belly shimmies with loosey-goosey grace, displaying the most individual dance personality I’ve seen in years; an intense, slender man looks perpetually troubled as he makes spectacular moves. Joined by a woman, they enact a variety of relationships with originality accompanied by an electronic score with some jazz riffs. I couldn't discern an overarching story, but that's the point of Dada, isn’t?
Mum Puppettheatre paid homage to the history of its art in Europe in The Fantoccini Brothers Return. The earliest vignette is based on a 1917 performance by the influential Russian painter Nina Efimova, while contemporary segments are written and directed by Aaron Cromie and Robert Smythe. Dave Johnson, Genevieve Perrier and Bradley K. Wrenn are talented actor/puppeteers who use a variety of formats that are surprisingly different from one another.
Two works-in-progress, Flamingo/Winnebago and Wandering Alice, are clever and original and deserve more detailed discussion (which I’ll give them in separate articles).
Emperor Jones disappoints
The festival’s biggest disappointment came courtesy of a professional company from New York, the Wooster Group. Eugene O’Neill’s early (1920) play, The Emperor Jones, is dated and rife with racial stereotypes; somehow, this company thought it could succeed with a production that accentuates the offensive elements.
A white woman with corked black face (Kate Volk) portrays the American black ex-con who convinces a West Indian island population that he possesses god-like powers. She delivers his lines in a sing-song parody of Southern Negro dialect while the white cockney accomplice, Smithers, is directed to mumble most of his lines off-stage. The parodist approach illuminates nothing, and deprives the work of any character development, pathos or involving drama.
Ari Fliakos was indecipherable as Smithers and Volk was loud as Jones. Elizabeth LeCompte directed. To what end?
To read other reviews of The Emperor Jones, click
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