Minnesotans to the Rescue

M: Hey, have you met Sigal?
ME: Um, wait a minute — got off the wait list at the last minute, no publicity, no pre-show buzz, just rolled into town?
M: That’s her.
ME: And you want me to…
M: Yeah. (to her) phil’s a blogger for the TCDP, and he owes me a few favors. (to me) You cool with this?
ME: Yeah, I got it.
M: Cool. (leaves)
SIGAL: Hi!
ME: Okay. Explain to me why I should care about your show in ten words or less.
SIGAL: Um…
ME: That’s one word.
SIGAL: Shit.
ME: That’s two words.

(dead silence)

So, aside from my being a total jackass, she proved to be charming, appealing, and playful, both in her preview and in person. Moreover, she just came all the way from San Francisco. I’m sure we can make it all the way to Franklin Avenue for her.

The title of her show is Sure to Cure, Dr. Amelia’s Medicine Show. Medicine shows? I love medicine shows! They’re like vaudeville and capitalism, two of my favorite things. Moreover, from her show description:

Old-time snake-oil huckster meets new-age self help guru—all in one doctor!

Ooh, satirey! Not that I have the faintest idea which direction she’s going with that — but as someone who has been extremely critical of the new-age and self-help movements, the parallel to medicine-show hucksterism is fascinating to me.

And as someone who’s done his share of touring, I empathize heartily with her current situation. Not just an opportunity to see a clever, funny show, but to be ambassadors of goodwill. Check her out, and let’s show ‘em what Minnesotans are made of.

(Er, passive-aggression? Liberal guilt?)

No, you ninnies: alcohol-induced hospitality. Let’s not let either Sigal Shoham or Arthur Guinness down.

Rorschach Theatre

I was stage-managing Kirsten and Dean’s show (Silent Poetry 2) down in Kansas City. Kirsten has a pretty awesome piece about a conductor who ends up battling her own hand. It’s a fine bit of slapstick, but one that also encourages further interpretation from its audience.

And one thought strikes me — does mime lend itself to interpretation because its boundaries are so vaguely defined? Relying as heavily as it does on audience visualization, there’s a point at which anything can represent anything.

—

I saw a preview of Joseph Scrimshaw’s show (The Tragedy of You) a few months back — the premise is that he interviews a random audience member and, based on details from their life, plugs them into a five-act Shakespearean tragedy.

The night I attended, a lot of his questions were responded to with political gibes: “Name a war-hungry general.” “General Bush!” “Name a politician.” “Senator Franken!” The upshot is that, for the night that I was in attendance, at least, the whole evening took a satirical bend — and one that I found kind of depressing as a political comic: the audience laughed gaily throughout, but they were responding only to the basic structure, with the pieces that they recognized inserted into appropriate places.

—

Oscar Wilde once said “Art reflects the audience, not the artist.” Which is a lovely little poetic sentiment, except for the fact that it almost entirely removes the artist from the equation of creation. I’m reminded of the man who said to the Jewish director Fritz Lang, after a viewing of his Metropolis, “You’re right. Hitler should be in power.”

Do I accept the premise that his interpretation is as valuable as mine? Is that really all that satire breaks down to? All that so much of art and storytelling breaks down to?

Out-of-Towner Showcase

ME: Is this your first time in Minnesota?
HER: Yes, it is.
ME: How is handing out postcards going?
HER: What do you mean?
ME: Y’know, are people making eye contact? Smiling?
HER: Well, they’re kind of fake-smiling.
ME: (spreading arms) Welcome to Minnesota!

I attended the out-of-towner showcase on Wednesday. To be honest, I was far too fatigued to form a fair or coherent response to everything I saw. I would like to toss out the following Quick Thoughts™:

– There was one piece called Habitat: A Documentary Theater Project. The basic thrust of this one is that the text is largely stapled together from a series of interviews with homeless folks in Duluth. So the project looks fascinating, and like something I’d really like to read — but I was really struggling with the performance aspects of it. Why?

Okay. I’m going to jump back for a moment to that old debate about music stands — storytellers tend to get very dogmatic about whether or not their use is appropriate in live performance. I’ve used both — roughly half of my storytelling shows have been memorized, and half have been read. It’s a fairly calculated decision based on what I’m doing at any given time, often driven more by instinct (with a retroactive rationalization) rather than reason.

But one thought strikes me: every autobiographical show I’ve performed has been performed with notes as reference. The one time I tried to do one without, I was extremely uncomfortable with the results.

Now, this was flashing through my head as I was watching the preview for Habitat. There were a number of actors onstage, playing a number of the characters who had been interviewed. And I found myself growing — as I often do with docudrama — extremely uncomfortable with the artifice: that each performer chose some kind of over-the-top physicality or voice to represent each character. Except that these aren’t fictional constructs: they’re people.

If I’m telling you about something my dad said or did, I don’t want to create a walk or an accent or something: I want to just tell you. And I found myself wanting, rather, to be told about these people, rather than watching someone attempt to counterfeit the reality of their experience.

Of course, everything we’re doing is counterfeit: but I’m comforted by the reminder that we’re experiencing reality filtered through another’s perception. I’m uncomfortable with the exercise of theatre tricks and illusions on a project that is — at least theoretically — documentary.

– On the flip side, the high point for me was Was My Brother in the Battle? SONGS OF WAR, which is really nothing more than an extremely well-done song recital. One of the draws is definitely that I’m pretty sure I know the lyrics to every damn song on the bill, but another — after last night’s performance — is the fact that the key performer is not only a skilled singer but able to effectively emote through the music.

And tying back to my earlier point — the song he chose to preview with was And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, a fairly intense little war story narrated from the point of view of a crippled veteran. He at no point pretends to be this crippled veteran — he doesn’t limp or sit in a wheelchair — but he speaks in the first person, and nevertheless emotionally engages in the song, and engages with us — but as himself, and through the music.

– It is not impossible that I’ve read far, far too much Brecht.

Spermalot: The Musical (Rehearsal Edition)

I first met Thatcher Williams in the 2007 Iowa Fringe Festival: since my road trip was taking me through Des Moines, I looked him up to see if he’d be interested in going out for a drink or something, and was delighted to be invited to one of his final rehearsals of Spermalot, which is playing at the Minnesota Fringe.

With the caveat that what I witnessed was only a rehearsal, sans costumes and, well, audience (comedy without an audience is something akin to professional wrestling without an audience), I’m prepared to state that it’s exactly what the title sounds like, and for me that was A Good Thing. The songs in particular are excellent, effectively parodying a variety of musical-theatre styles. The awkward, artificial choreography is a very old joke, but the reason it’s an old joke is because it’s a very good joke, and a funny one. (Also, the two female cast members totally shone, both in singing and comedy chops.)

(On the other hand, the comedy dialogues that interspersed the songs could be hit-or-miss for me: it’s faithful to the parody, with that dopey, obvious, presentational kind of comedy, but could occasionally fall into being as wince-inducing as the stuff they’re ridiculing.)

The puppetry work was interesting: all of the main characters are played by hand-held puppets, which are held up next to the actors’ faces, presumably to take advantage of both: the quirky movements of the sperm bodies and the expressiveness of the actors’ faces. This was about halfway successful for me. I found myself wanting more movement from the various spermatazoa (and if I had a nickel for every time I’d written that sentence, I’d have, uh, one nickel), but often they would simply be bobbing in space or just opening and closing their mouths. So while the actors had extremely animated faces and necks, the puppets would often be sitting limply by their sides, which feels like a bit of a missed comic opportunity.

Still — it’s Spermalot. It’s dumb, it’s dorky, it’s entertaining. And I’d totally buy a soundtrack if they had one.

2009 Kansas City Fringe Review: Thursday, July 24th

The Miniature Housewife

So I saw this show, and I started off by being incredibly resistant to it, mainly because the audience was laughing pretty steadily throughout, and I don’t think I laughed once. It’s full of some pretty inventive sight gags, but I don’t find being zany necessarily the same thing as being funny. (The Zucker Brothers disagree.)

Okay, but once I shut out everyone else’s response and just tried to approach the show on its own merits, I found myself really fascinated with the whole thing. It’s basically a kind of dark satire of that image of the nineteen-fifties homemaker (one who is, in this case, literally married to her own house). So maybe it’s some association that I’m bringing to this, but I found the protagonist to be far too familiar – to resemble far too many women that I’ve known – if not broken women, then, well, breaking ones.

I found the several video sequences that punctuated the show to be particularly disturbing – images of a hideously made-up woman, in which she speaks through a series of fragmented close-ups. It really seemed to be effectively ripping to shreds that plastic conception of beauty.

The people around me seemed to find those images hysterical. There was also much physical business that won laughter, including a long dance sequence by the titular housewife. And while the movements she was making were absurd, I couldn’t find much funny in them: they didn’t emerge from joy, but everything about her conveyed misery and exhaustion. She smiles at us, but that smile is no more real than that of Marceau’s mask maker.

She’s also an extraordinarily versatile singer, shifting easily into a number of styles with incredible vocal control. And more importantly, the songs did exactly what theatrical songs are supposed to do: they revealed the internal life of the character, in a way that couldn’t be indicated by text.

I didn’t really buy the ending – I hadn’t seen anything leading up to that point to indicate to me that she was capable of taking the action she ultimately did. At least, it was inconsistent with the character and the story I was seeing, whether or not it was consistent with what they were doing. So, I clearly didn’t have the same experience as everyone else in the audience – but the experience I had was a compelling one. Easily my favorite show of the Fringe.

2009 Kansas City Fringe Reviews: Tuesday, July 22nd

Veni, Vidi, Vici

Okay, so this was a piece by someone who’s obviously a tremendously skilled performer, but one that lost me very quickly; the action is meandering, and I found it difficult to follow the logic of it. Basically, she discovers a piece of chalk and improvises various rules as to what she can do with it (lines drawn cannot be crossed, unless circular “doors” are drawn through them, et cetera). This business was clever. The show description indicates that this is some sort of indictment of human greed, or something.

What she’s physically doing in the space seems to be incidental to her character-building work, which is driven by her relationship to the audience. And while her physical and vocal performance is crisp (though I did find the high-pitched squeaking she uses to communicate grating), I found myself wanting her to hold still and communicate something, make something happen – the bulk of the show consists of her performing a simple action, giggling, and looking to us for our response.

The show is primarily about her relationship to us (or, at least, that’s what she devotes the bulk of her time and energy to onstage). And I’m not simply referring to the audience-interactive sequences of the show (although those could be difficult to follow, as well – it wasn’t always entirely clear what she wanted us to do, and the fact that her character was taunting us through that process kind of complicated that) – in many respects, our response seems to dictate the nature of the show we get. So in fairness to the performer, we weren’t a very responsive audience – in fairness to us, I don’t know that we were given much to respond to.

Bear Hugs and Bingo Balls

I’ve been a fan of Mike Shaeffer for years – I see his stuff religiously, and in fact I think I’d previously seen every piece that he did here. I’d cheerfully sit through it again. For me, seeing one of his shows is like kicking back and popping in a favorite album – so I’m way past the point where I have any idea what this looks like to someone who hasn’t seen his stuff before.

It’s exactly what it sounds like – rapid-fire, profane, pop-cultural spoken-word comedy. If you don’t get one particular reference, don’t worry – five more will be by in the next twenty seconds, as he sifts and sorts through Gen-X detritus like a one-man episode of Family Guy.

One thing that’s been striking me the past couple of times that I’ve seen him – and in this particular show as well – is that what he does works because of his vulnerability; his dirty jokes aren’t leered at us, but delivered with all of the giggling schoolboy fun of arrested adolescence. He has a genuine love for his chosen subject matter, as he leaps from parodies of Hunter S. Thompson to George Romero to a bevy of classic rock musicians; if you know half of the people he’s talking about, it’s impossible not to share that warmth. And judging by the sheer range of the things that he loves, it’s likely that you will.

Naughty Knickers – Take II

This is exactly what it sounds like: lithe and attractive girls remove their clothes in ways that are equal parts athletic and ironic. Performers are uniformly excellent in both arenas.

Bizarre as it may seem to apply too much analysis to this, one quick thought – I’ve seen a couple of burlesque shows by now, and they seem to follow a variety of formats – often the dancing girls will be alternated with other specialty acts (comedy, magic, et cetera). This, on the other hand, is pure burlesque. The danger of that is that the action can grow repetitive, when you’re seeing essentially the same kind of material over and over again – there’s a numbing effect from over-stimulation. Both good sex and good comedy are all about rhythm changes. There’s a reason that it’s more exciting to watch a girl undress for you than it is for her to just walk into the room naked – it’s the suspense and the anticipation.

That said, they actually do a pretty impressive job of finding ways to mix up the formula. (Including a piece by a girl who, yes, walks into the room naked.) So I may just be jaded, as part of the generation that grew up with internet porn, but novelty is stimulating.

The Death of Cupid

Okay, so let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way – this has extraordinary production values for a Fringe show, and the ensemble is superb (as nearly as I can tell, it’s made up of a kind of KC Fringe All-Stars). It’s an impressive intellect that could conceive of this wide variety of elements and bring them together into anything resembling coherent. It’s well-done and it’ll be a Fringe hit and it deserves to be and you should see it and you’ll enjoy it. So with all that nonsense out of the way, I’d like to take a minute to dig into what I found to be the most interesting part – the text.

This is basically a loose adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. I’m actually a big fan of Aristophanes – The Birds is my single favorite play ever written – and while this is the one that’s likely most familiar to modern audiences, it’s one that I’ve struggled with. Lysistrata is about a woman who organizes a sex strike in order to stop a bloody and senseless war. So it’s found continuing life both in the feminist movement and in the pacifist movement (since the play is, at least superficially, anti-war), and theatres love to do readings of it whenever we invade another country and yadda yadda.

However, her status as one of literature’s first anti-war protestors isn’t sufficient for this production: here, they need to re-invent her also as a kind of champion of secular humanism, capable of facing off with (and ultimately overthrowing) the gods. This is mainly achieved by stapling Aristophanes’ plot to a kind of celestial battle between rational thought (represented by Athena) and divine fate (represented by Cupid); between free will and predestination; between individualism and collectivism. Heady stuff, and there’s also a lot of fun had in the clever re-invention of various Greek gods (I particularly found Mercury’s cameo to be laugh-out-loud hilarious). This is also the section of the play which most frequently skates into melodrama – nearly every character gets (at least one) overwrought speech (with key phrases repeated, suddenly and with great intensity, to make the audience jump – TO MAKE THE AUDIENCE JUMP).

I found the script to be at its most tolerable when its ideas are understated – despite superb performances from each actor, I caught myself wincing when they abandoned their irony and self-awareness. (I found the scene between Lysistrata and the magistrate of Athens to be particularly egregious – he repeatedly beats her, apparently for no other purpose than to shock the audience into hating him enough to completely discredit his ideology.)

Okay, but all of these issues I’m having are really a tip of the hat to the strength of the adaptation. If Lysistrata comes off as a shrill, emotionally manipulative political cartoon (and please note that that’s a reference to the character, not to the actor’s performance, which I found to be remarkably controlled), well, she does in the source text, too. It’s the very reason why she’s been so widely loved for so long, and why I’ve always found her kind of obnoxious. In the programme, the writer boasts that his play asks some dangerous questions: I’m curious as to what, precisely, those questions are.

Pre-Fringe Profile: The Problem of the Body: Why Is Our Society Ashamed of Bodily Urges?

SHOW TITLE: The Problem of the Body: Why is our society ashamed of bodily urges?
PRODUCER: Prof. Rudman
HAILING FROM: Minnesota
SHOW DESCRIPTION: Like John Waters channeled through Sir Kenneth Clark, Prof. Rudman examines contemporary American attitudes toward bodily urges by comparing recent media coverage with jaw-dropping imagery from other cultures.
WHAT CAUGHT MY INTEREST: The combination of the political and the historical. It’s a bull’s-eye for my corner of geekdom.

Just who do you think you are, anyway?

Damon Rudman is the Jonathan Wad Endowed Professor and Proctor of Scatology and Sexology at the Upper United States University (Up.U.S.U.). (Actually, it’s a nom de theatre, but I got a mortgage to pay, and it might be hard to work if every time someone Googles me they get what they may consider “salacious filth.”)

So what’s the big idea?

Many people decry the amount of sex and vulgarity in US media today. They feel that our society is losing its way, and they long for restoration of “traditional” decency. However, history and anthropology prove that prudishness has seldom been the norm. On the contrary, in comparison to other cultures, we still stand out as uncommonly ashamed of our bodies and their urges; acknowledging them is seen as perverse and suppressing them is seen as natural.

By juxtaposing contemporary media with artifacts and verbal accounts from other times and places, this show will deconstruct contemporary attitudes surrounding our urges for sex, food, sleep, and the defecatory urges (including belching, spitting, nose-picking, farting, pissing, and shitting).

How did you come up with a screwy idea like that?

Our bodies are always near at hand. Urges arise regularly. Isn’t it nuts to feel ashamed about them? What virtue is there in repression? Why should prigs hold the moral high-ground?

Why should I care?

Expect mind-blowing edutainment! Fun for your whole family—if your family don’t mind dirty pictures and stuff.

Justify your show’s existence in haiku form.

Bodies not dirty
Repression is perverse
Laughter can free us

Pre-Fringe Profile: Agamemnon

SHOW TITLE: Agamemnon
PRODUCER: Shadow & Substance Theatre
HAILING FROM: Minnesota
SHOW DESCRIPTION: In this darkly comic adaptation of Aeschylus’ 458 BC award-winning tragedy, Agamemnon comes home after ten long years at the Trojan Wars to a wife who is plotting to kill him and a ghost who is bent on revenge. Hilarity, violence and incest ensue. Join us for this murderous family reunion!
WHAT CAUGHT MY INTEREST: I ran into this dude hanging out with an old friend from high school I hadn’t seen in years. When I described my show as following the old Fringe formula of “It’s like this, only it’s set in this!”, he sheepishly confessed that that was the nature of his show, as well. Fiddling around with Greek nonsense? I’m surprised this didn’t land on my radar before now. Also, he coins the term “Logorrheic.”

Just who do you think you are, anyway?

Shadow & Substance started in 2007 as my brainchild out of two desires, though it took a while to get going, with several major life changes for me—being out of work for a few months, changing careers, and finding a satisfactory balance between my personal and work life. I wanted to form a company around the group of creative friends that had come together over several years, and build on the network of artists, directors, designers and actors I came across—people I wanted to work with, who have similar artistic philosophies and aims, and just want to do theatre. Second, it was in response to the belief that much of theatre today has gotten away from the main objective of telling good stories in favour of making a profit—the catch-22 for any creative person or group today, that you’ve got to make money in order to make art. With the heartbreaking closing of the Jeune Lune in 2008, I knew that I had to take Dominique Serrand’s words to heart to come up with a vision to create “agile, nomadic, entrepreneurial theatre.” And now the dream is finally coming together.

So what’s the big idea?

We decided to take a classic, beloved, hallowed piece of dusty ancient Greek theatre about a woman tired of her husband coming home late after work (ten years late, to be precise); twist, bastardise and maim it into something silly and comedic; and serve it up chilled with some after-dinner cocktails and a flagon of whiskey.

In the original there’s lots and lots of talking and hinkle-pinkling around, and Clytemnestra spends most of her time brooding and trying to decide how to kill her husband who has suddenly returned from the Trojan wars. Arguably she had ten years to think this through (one of the worst documented cases of procrastination ever), but she was busy fucking her husband’s first cousin (or first-cousin once removed—those incestuous family trees are so tough to trace) so it’s understandable how that might have slipped her mind.

Our version is much less logorrheic. Modern audiences really can’t handle that much prolonged talking (ourselves included), so we try to do as little of it as possible in this production. We’ve retained a skeletal outline of the plot of Agamemnon, so the basic show is there. We just updated it with a sort of psychedelic 70s feel.

How did you come up with a screwy idea like that?

Several years ago, writer and director (and titular character) Eric Netterlund showed me the first couple of pages of an adaptation he was writing of an ancient Greek tragedy that he was doing up as a dark comedy. I’d seen some of Eric’s writing before and knew that it was brilliant, hilarious and engaging, and those first few pages were wonderful; but he didn’t do anything with it for the longest time. Then came time for the 2009 Fringe applications, so I told him that if he would finish the script I’d enter it under my company and produce. It took some persistent, patient prodding, but eventually we brought a completed first draft to the lottery in February. The rest is history. One thing I will say is that each character in this show bears resemblance to characters from Alice in Wonderland in terms of the madcap nature of the story, with a little more violence and hilarity.

Why should I care?

Murder! Revenge! Betrayal! Ghosts! Sock puppets!

Justify your show’s existence in haiku form.

When you knock up your
daughter to kill your brother
bad things will happen.

Pre-Fringe Pre-Fringe Profile: Pre-Fringe Appetizers

Okay, so I’m breaking my own rules here a bit — because I’m a rockstar like that — to plug a show that’s not strictly part of the Minnesota Fringe. It certainly is in spirit, though, so for those of you chomping at the bit for some Fringey goodness, these guys have something they’d like to put in your mouth. Er, so to speak.

SHOW TITLE: Pre-Fringe Appetizers: Two Courses of Comedy (first course for this profile)
PRODUCER: Questionable Company Theatre
HAILING FROM: Minnesota
SHOW DESCRIPTION: Box Wine TC and Questionable Company Theatre join forces to present “Pre-Fringe Appetizers: Two Courses of Comedy,” a theatrical double-header featuring sketch comedy and a short play. Panda Sandwich, a new sketch comedy group, brings together some of the sharpest comedic minds in the Twin Cities to collaboratively create inventive, irreverent scenes chock full of unicorns, carnies, and unexpected bat attacks.
WHAT CAUGHT MY INTEREST: I was a fan of “Orange”, the show these guys did in last year’s Fringe. More than that, I was a fan of their gumption and enthusiasm; the two founders pretty much just moved here, filled out an application, and started a theatre company. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of them soon.

Just who do you think you are, anyway?

Questionable Company Theatre is a company started by us (Rachel Teagle and Ben Egerman) in late 2007 in order to produce our play, Orange: a farce (about terrorism) in Fringe ’08. Since the success of that show, we’ve been working around town with folks like Walking Shadow, Bedlam, Workhaus, and some fly-by-night operation called the Guthrie. While not doing theatre, Ben edits on his audition tape for American Idol: Sweden, and Rachel works toward her long term goal of knitting a gun.

So what’s the big idea?

The big idea is: we’ve started a new comedy troupe, Panda Sandwich, where all the sketches have been written collaboratively by the group, and it’s going to be going up at Bedlam the week before Fringe, July 22-25, at 7:30 PM, as act 1 of “Pre-Fringe Appetizers: Two Courses of Comedy.” The idea behind creating the group was to have a process where we could work as a troupe to develop our individual ideas from basic concepts into sketches; we’ve found this the best way to create scenes that are both well-structured and surprising. We wanted a space where we didn’t shy away from being loud, crass, dirty, vulgar, and ridiculous, but not solely for the sake of being loud, crass, dirty, vulgar, and/or ridiculous. And above all, we founded the group with the ideal that comedy should be fun to make and fun to watch.

Oh, and we wanted a really sweet title that we could use with such taglines as “Panda Sandwich: Thick and Juicy Comedy” or “Panda Sandwich: Put us in your mouth.”

How did you come up with a screwy idea like that?

Well, there were a few points that led to this—we both have a background in comedy writing, and we had seen a few comedy shows that friends were a part of that gave us a longing to do a sketch show. Ambitious fools that we were, we drew up plans to produce TWO shows in the 2009 Fringe festival, and were promptly drawn 100th and 138th on the waitlist. Along with waitlisted friends Box Wine Theatre, we decided not to give up and to independently produce our shows, partly because we wanted to put something awesome onstage, and partly out of spite. Thus, “Pre-Fringe Appetizers: Two Courses of Comedy” was birthed.

Why should I care?

Because we’ve put together a show that’s fun, funny, well-crafted and full of unicorns, erotic arts and crafts, and more carnies than you can safely shake a stick at. Which, we guess, would probably be only one, but we have more carnies than that.

And if that wasn’t enough, might we mention that our talented cast includes not only us, in all our sexitude, but also that of John McConville, Hudson, Wisconsin’s unofficial Next Top Model, Michael Venske, whose scooter is named Shirley, and Heather Meyer, who is wanted in five states for hilarity, and two states for statutory arson.

Plus if you don’t come, Rachel will find you (As soon as she can crochet bullets. She’s keeping a list.)

Justify your show’s existence in haiku form.

Waitlist? Ha, we say!
Let’s go rogue, out-fringe the Fringe:
Let’s eat some Panda.

2009 Capital Fringe Reviews

Good Enough For Government Work

A good storyteller is one who’s able to weave interesting anecdotes out of pretty much anything. At its heart, this is the latest in the burgeoning genre of office comedies (albeit with a somewhat greater-than-usual proportion of bureaucratic insanity) – but the dude is sufficiently likeable and enthusiastic to make the hour a pleasure. The driving engine of the story is a ludicrously petty bit of psychological warfare taking place between himself and one of his colleagues, and the various complications which result from it. It’s not really a must-see or a life-changer, and there’s times I wish he would have plumbed a little deeper – there’s a weirdness, after all, to finding yourself in the odd position of having your own self-worth determined by some bureaucratic rat-race – but it’s pleasant enough, and worth checking out on its own merits.

(He’s also an auditor, incidentally, Does that mean I should be wary of criticizing him?)

So Do You Love Me Yet?

Now here’s a performer who knows how to work her audience – she’s confident, sexy, knows it and uses it. As for the content – as nearly as I can tell, the script is little more than a series of thematically-connected poems that have been stapled together. There are some lovely pieces, and some pretty awesome turns of phrase (“my black-coffee self switched to decaf”), but what’s really impressive about this script is their arrangement – laid out as they are, the show ends up taking on the quality of an expressionistic, stream-of-consciousness monologue, detailing the thousands of contradictions surrounding romantic love. It’s the ability to make such dramatic leaps from one conflicting thought to another that makes this so compelling. It skates towards being maudlin at times (there’s a scene where she talks to a teddy bear), but she consistently pulls it back with the intensity of her performance. She also chose to end on a somewhat syrupy note (“love is you plus me plus hope”) that I personally found off-putting after the thoughtfulness of what preceded it. But hey – the fact that I can still clearly recall so many lines from the show nearly a week after seeing it is an indication of how well-composed this thing is. I saw five shows this weekend, and this one was the clear standout.

All That Was Left of Them

There’s a lot to admire here – I’m a huge fan of the source texts, and they do some pretty clever stuff with them, both in terms of writing and staging – which left me scratching my head as to why I wasn’t enjoying it more. This is definitely the first show I’ve seen in the Festival that really seemed to suffer from its assigned space – it’s a movement-heavy show, and their main set piece takes up a huge chunk of the playing area, meaning that the performers are struggling to move up and down a single narrow strip – I really wished I’d had the opportunity to see what they could do with broader, more sweeping movements. Kudos to the actors for committing to their choices with enthusiasm, but I question a lot of the choices that were made – some seemed obvious or heavy-handed (e.g. the toy soldier’s fantasy sequence of the ballerina while on the boat), others emotionally manipulative (although that may be symptomatic of the source material, as well – Andersen has an obsession with the purifying power of suffering that presents some problems for me, so that may be wholly personal).

There are a few cool and inventive images – like the girl with her neck and wrists caught in webbing (though I wish they could have found more things to do with it). Her performance was surprisingly intense in that particular piece, and they played a bit with audience discomfort – which I think could have been pushed even further. I also found the emotional cues provided by the music to be jarring – nearly all of those moments (particularly the ending) would, I think, have been much more powerful in silence. (Also, I don’t know how I feel about the closing image – of having salvation equated with food. Of course, I’m the dude whose Savior is regularly eaten once a week, so this may again be a personal issue.)

Okay. The fact that I’m jumping around and nitpicking so much suggests that I’m having a hard time pinpointing exactly what the show was missing for me. But while there’s a lot of formal inventiveness on display here – and a set of very appealing actors who are prepared to be quite vulnerable with us – at the end of the show, I’m forced to say that I didn’t connect emotionally with the stories that were presented. There was a large and responsive audience present, so I suspect that there’s some barrier that I’m bringing: whatever the case, while I wasn’t glaring at my watch and antsy to get out, I can’t say that I was left with a really transformative experience.

McSwiggin’s Pub

It’s doubtful that this show even requires a review – it has all the makings of a Fringe hit, and deservedly so. But just a few quick, fragmented thoughts:

–          Some really nice character work, most notably because it’s so subtle. A lot of actors would be tempted to go for over-the-top, outrageous physicalities – he exercises restraint, and it pays off. This isn’t a stand-up routine, and it’s not that the jokes are necessarily all that funny on their own merits – they’re funny because of who they come from. He gets that, and that’s the main success of the show.

–          He also avoids the awkwardness of leaping back-and-forth between characters for rapid-fire dialogue – he chooses one character at a time and allows himself (and us) to settle in with them, showing us the various other characters through his responses to their behavior. The points where he does make the switch are carefully chosen for comic or dramatic effect. There’s an artfulness to this that’s worth lauding.

–          So it’s a character-driven piece – but he’s also occasionally willing to throw character out the window in favor of a laugh line, which I found jarring. I particularly found this with the character of the sleazy politician – he’s great and just boatloads of entertaining, but he feels at times like he wandered in from another show entirely. In particular, the scene in which he’s reading to his infant daughter – taking on demonic voices to represent the opposing party – seemed rife with irony, in that that’s sort of what the actor was doing with this character. I appreciated the depiction of him as an affectionate father, but ultimately the character didn’t feel to me like much more than a throwaway gag.

–          As opposed to the other driving characters of the piece, who I found totally compelling. Incidentally, this is the second show I’ve seen that revolves around people working on Capitol Hill – this is totally alien to me, and an aspect of DC culture that I find fascinating.