"Microworld(s)' and "Digital Effects' at Fringe Festival.

Thaddeus Phillips and his Lucidity Suitcase International inhabit the spirit of the Philadelphia Fringe in his imaginative, low-key whimsicality. Phillips has been a fertile source of many original shows over the years, including works like El Conquistador! and Flamingo/Winnebago, which, although never total successes, lifted us through his layered metaphorical imagination.

Within this year's Festival, Phillips produced "Off the Grid," a micro-fest of four shows, one of which was his own one-man show, Microworld(s) Part #1, and another, Digital Effects (performed with the fingers), was a solo by New York magician actor Steve Cuiffo. All "Off the Grid" performances were run on renewable and self-generated power sources like a Weza generator, a foot-pumpable source of energy.

In Microworld(s), Phillips is the last resident of Tokyo's Nakagin Tower, a modular building from the early '70s whose capsule-like units were intended to be replaced over time but never were. Now Phillips creates a white box that becomes the failed utopian living space for his character Milo in the 24 hours before the building's demolition. (The real demolition in Tokyo has apparently been put on hold.)

We enter Milo's existence, which ranges from the mundane to recollections of his lonely inventor hero Nikola Testa, who's reduced to talking to the pigeons at the end of his life. Milo recites Hamlet's soliloquy with only his yellow rubber duckie, Fumio, as his audience. Although Microworld(s) begs for further development, it admirably explores the ways our humanity survives within modernity's inhuman structures.

A post-modern magician

Steve Cuiffo's Digital Effects reacquaints us with the sublime minimalism of sleight-of-hand card tricks. Cuiffo had the entire audience (and who knows what else?) in the palms of his hands as jaws dropped, eyes widened in disbelief, and the feeling of being in a performance séance spread among us over the course of an hour.

Cuiffo is a consummate actor who never loses eye contact with the audience and offers a mildly ironic take on his card tricks, slyly hinting that, as a post-modern performer, he'll deal us a more contemporary deck and unveil his process— exclusively to us. The seduced audience succumbs in total gullibility to the magic we experience (and of course the secret isn't revealed after all).

The audience is even treated to a concluding purification rite— not inappropriate for the Jews in the audience about to enter their Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur)— in which each audience member can toss into the air various cards representing bad health and pain, leaving us all with the same single card, which had been marked (somehow, somewhere) "Good Fortune."

Purified and purged by magic tricks— that's a Fringe Festival first.