Philly Fringe 2018: Svaha Theatre Collective's' Long Trouble' and 'Phaedra's Love'

D'Avella calls them The Crown Is Burning Series, and in both, a monarchy is thrown into chaos by the royals' needs and desires.

Long Trouble

This 45-minute edit of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher's Henry VIII trims away most of the men, except for unctuous Cardinal Wolsey (Leo Bond). In the only scene in which Henry is addressed, he's represented by his crown.

Long Trouble highlights the first two women Henry used, abused, and discarded. Jessica Otterbine plays first wife Catherine ("Twenty years your wife with many children by you"), whose failure to produce an heir makes her expendable. Henry's second wife Anne Boleyn (Stephanie Iozzia) readies to take her place.

Both queens bore famous daughters who became rulers. We don't meet Boleyn's child Elizabeth I, but Catherine's progeny, Mary Tudor (Heather Birmingham), becomes the notorious "Bloody Mary." Long Trouble focuses on the three women's rising and falling fortunes.

D'Avella works the Mascher space well, using its depth to create striking distances between the three women and Wolsey, a modern politician hiding behind a cross. Early verbiage, spoken clearly and enhanced by the space's echo, gives way to music and dance that explore their emotions in a sensually abstract style.

All three are distinctive, but Birmingham's Mary — who scorns "the merciful constriction of good women" — proves the most compelling, revealing cold ambition that foreshadows her brief reign.

Phaedra's Love

English playwright Sarah Kane (1971–99) contrasts to the extreme with Long Trouble's Elizabethan scribes. Her verbally lean, openly sexual, brutally violent version of Phaedra's story echoes Long Trouble. In both, we see how royalty's private concerns affect public policy.

Amanda Schoonover is simply stunning as the title character, married to Theseus (Jed Krivisky) but in love with his son Hippolytus (Thierry Saintine), a sullen, aloof, amoral slob who masturbates while watching TV and munching junk food. Her stepson's lazy scorn fuels her desperate lust. He allows fellatio, then dumps her.

This intimate action, and much more to come, is discreetly staged, so that we glimpse no nudity or real sexual contact but fully appreciate its loveless brutality.

Schoonover, alternately wound tight and emotionally collapsing from one moment to the next, shows Phaedra obsessed with a horrible man despite all reason. After listing his many faults, she confesses, "You thrill me" without knowing why. Schoonover performed in a memorable 2005 production of Kane's 4:48 Psychosis and delivers the intensity Kane demands.

Rejected and humiliated, Phaedra seeks revenge. After more smartly staged sex, violence, and violent sex involving her daughter Strophe (Rachel O'Hanlon-Rodriguez) and a priest (Kienan McCartney), both seduced by Hippolytus, this leads to mob justice.

D'Avella and fight choreographer Michael Pray stop short of Kane's lurid stage directions, which have a man's genitals cut off, barbecued, and fed to a dog. Greek tragedy, even in modern clothes and language, doesn't end happily.

Through the fire

Though Svaha doesn't emphasize the connection, one can't help but muse about how a certain country's leader might meet his reign's end. Family dynamics and illicit lust threatening a ruler feels like the evening news.

Svaha means "to go into the fire," the young company's mission statement explains, "to throw yourself into something with all of your heart, body, and soul." Like their past Fringe productions, 2016's Crave and last summer's adaptation of Miss Julie, this ambitious pairing charges right into the flames and propels us in, too.