CityBeat Fringe Festival Coverage

Fringe Wraps Up With 'Picks'

The 2007 Cincinnati Fringe concluded with a big party at Know Theatre's Underground Bar on Saturday evening. During the party, with more than 200 people in attendance, Know Theatre artistic director and Fringe organizer Jason Bruffy announced the three "Pick of the Fringe" winners.

The “audience pick” went to Calculus: The Musical, which sold out five performances early in the festival, causing Bruffy and his colleagues to add a performance, the first time that’s happened in four years. The “producers pick” went to The Satori Group’s iLove:, a piece about love and sex in today’s electronically connected world. The “critics pick” went to True + False, an array of monologues that invited audiences to vote as to whether they were real and which were made up.

Bruffy says more than 6,000 tickets were sold for the 2007 Fringe year, about a 20 percent increase over 2006. For reviews of all Fringe productions, scroll down this page.

— Rick Pender

iNput

The “N” in iNput, a dance work from Megan Pitcher of MegLouise Dance, might mean anything. If it was meant to emphasize the fascinating input the nine-member improvisational company sought from the sparse audience Monday at the Contemporary Art Center’s black box theater, it could stand for “Next to Nothing.” And maybe that’s a shame.

But I, for one, was a little mystified about what my participation ended up amounting to. Entering audience members received a program describing the upcoming performance as a meeting ground where dreams, choices, questions and explorations would be presented, both ours and the company’s. We were invited to write a dream or wish of ours on a slip of paper for consideration. We were also given three rectangles of colored paper, which we were to raise to indicate our choice of options during the performance. It would all be explained.

Pitcher has said she wants her all-female company of movers to present themselves as ordinary people, rather than stereotypical “dancer” personae, to avoid mining stereotypical women’s dance image such as ghosts (ballet’s Giselle?) or a goddesses (the prima ballerina?), even though those images are not what most modern dancers portray. The implication seemed to be that if we found her dancers drib and drab, we could dig into the performance for fresher meaning by examining our suggestions as portrayed by the dancers.

For me, unfortunately, that wish never came true. The performance moved with glacial slowness, beginning with one dancer who established herself onstage in parallel foot position and began to wave her arms and torso in an almost robotic fashion, as if she were making kinesthetic discoveries. She reached, raised one arm and considered it and made variations on that theme as more dancers slowly entered and established their presence onstage in the same manner. This pacing was a taste of things to come.

Eventually, the group moved into a circular configuration, with more running steps and carving motions of the arms and hands. After a disembodied voiceover asked, “What does your heart long for?” we were treated to the bringing forth of the large glass snifter in which we had placed our suggestions. Each dancer drew and solemnly proclaimed the “dream or wish” — oddly, each one included the desire for “Peace.” Whether the continuing program had any more meaning to deliver was hard to discern, because by then most had lost interest.

There were many intriguing beginnings of what appeared as a combination of pre-rehearsed and improvised moves, sometimes seeming to be lead by one dancer. A sequence that drew on contact improvisation technique was configured as two lines of women across from each other. One line repeatedly launched themselves toward the opposing group, as in a strange game of Red Rover. But nothing developed other than a vague feeling that the dancers were being led by random inner feelings prompted by words, often channeling into preconceived sequences. Turns out that the idea of “Peace” was more soothing than remarkable, at least for MegLouise Dance.

Pre-performance, the audience had been invited to just “jump in” with shouted questions or suggestions to the dancers. Unfortunately, it never happened. The genuine smiles on the faces of the performers as they bowed briefly post-performance were the first indication that this earnest group might have had much more to offer. Grade: D

— Kathy Valin

Ancestral Voices

This is a delightful dance-theater experience that takes you straight into the poignant and poetic world of magical Ukrainian folklore, where the moon dances with the stars in the blue vault of heaven, spring blazes with plentiful flowers and willows bend like drunkards in the wind.

At base are the ancient traditions of oral storytelling and the piercing tone and expressive embellishment of traditional Ukrainian “open-throat” singing, both mastered by narrator Nadia Tarnawsky. Her solid, motherly presence anchors the hour-long performance, which weaves through eight scenes of poetry, dancing, singing and puppetry loosely tracing the divergent life paths of two sisters, one rich and one poor.

Alternately speaking and singing, with deftly interspersed Ukrainian-to-English translations, Tarnawsky’s voice joins additional recorded voices and traditional ethnic instruments including cimbalom, violin, sopilka, zozulka and bandura, according to program notes. Dancers Erin Conway, Catherine Meredith, Anna Roberts and Mark Tomasic (who had a terrific solo portraying Fire) bring emotion, vitality and clarity to Natalie M. Kapeluck’s choreography, portraying a variety of characters and situations extremely well within the limited space they have to work at the Contemporary Arts Center’s black box theater.  They also become puppeteers and prop masters, as needed. 

Ancestral Voices has so much aural and visual richness that following the sisters’ lives eventually didn’t seem nearly as important as marveling at the wondrous tales being told along the way. As “the stars speak to the moon,” two dancers loft illuminated globes that represent the moon and a star dancing a charming duet.

A new bride, thrust into the home of her unfriendly mother-in-law, is transformed into a poplar tree during her husband’s absence, which the mother-in-law then commands him to cut. The tree begs, “Don’t chop me, beloved. I am your wife.” It is too late, but a child is found within the branches of the tree.
A barrel-maker’s daughter (portrayed cleverly by a life-size puppet with two “live” arms) refuses a man’s advances and runs away. When he catches her, she tells him she would rather “rot in the grave than live in slavery with you.” He dispatches her, but her grave beckons to the Wind (given voice by an undulating dancer and a flute), saying “Do not let me fade away.”

A woman sings “Mother, I Love a Man of the Black Sea” who leads “me barefoot through the frost.” When her lover disappears at sea (from a wooden boat floating on top of a fabric sea), the bereft woman vows to become a mermaid, “find him and embrace him.”

The final scene evokes a celebration feast but, like all things folkloric, brushed with melancholy. When, surrounded by masked dancer in the guise of Earth, Wind, Water and Fire, Tarnawsky’s singer finally prophesies that her soul “shall speak in the leaves of the willow tree” and intones “remember me when I am gone.” It's a lovely and heartbreaking moment, as authentic as you're likely to get in these days of easy virtual entertainment. Grade: A-

— Kathy Valin

The Monkey's Paw

The dysfunctional relationship that playwright-director-actor Kevin Crowley conjures up in his odd, intense but strangely frigid play, The Monkey’s Paw, would sail off the charts in any clinical psych textbook. Mike, Tish and a son who’s seen only as an infant doll qualify as a family only in a names-on-a-contract, legal sense.

They are married. They did produce the child. But they're monumentally incapable of creating or inhabiting a familial relationship. Hell, he’s monumentally unsuited to any kind of nurturing connection. She might have loved him at the beginning. Perhaps was only intrigued by him. From the get-go his treatment of her is one offhand horror after another — causing one to wonder why she doesn’t reach for a gun and murder the bastard instead of reaching for a gin bottle.

The two characters are vividly focused both in Crowley’s occasionally acidly funny script and in the crisp performances they’re being given, but they remain stubbornly remote. And for all that the technical support, including original video, is notches above the typical Fringe Festival production, watching the 65 time-warped minutes of The Monkey’s Paw remains unsettling, an invigorating but ultimately unsatisfying experience.

As a child Mike (Crowley) was neglected and thoroughly abused with disinterest by his father. As an adult he was forced into the family’s janitorial business. He and Tish (Angela Zito) meet, flirt, bond, wed and have a son without exhibiting any particular affection for each other.

Mike is pathologically incapable of caring for, of even touching, the boy. He vomits at the sight of a soiled diaper. He is both revolted and sent into a jealous snit by the sight of the child nursing at Tish’s breast. He works at not remembering the kid’s name. He binds the year-old into his high chair and feeds him non-alcoholic beer.

Later on he takes his now 8-year-old son on a camping trip and casually abandons him in the wild. Asked by a frantic Tish where the boy is, Mike says — as he’s pouring himself a drink — that he wandered off and Mike did look around for him for an hour or so but then came on home.

In a pre-Fringe interview, Crowley said the piece is about “the fear of fatherhood.” Yep. And then some.

During the camping trip Mike lounges by a campfire and relates to his son the story told in W. W. Jacobs’ 1902 short story. Couple with son who works in a factory are given the magic paw by a drunken sailor. It grants three wishes, he says. Wish One: The wife asks for wealth. An official from their son’s place of employment arrives with the news that the young man was killed in a factory accident. He hands them a compensatory $1,000. Chagrined and grieving, the woman uses Wish Two to beg for her son’s return and soon the mangled body comes stumping up the lane toward the house. Barely in time the husband finds the paw and uses Wish Three to send the son out of their lives and back to his grave.

Crowley’s Monkey’s Paw spins its own dark hallucinations around that tale. Grade: B

— Tom McElfresh

A Hypnotic Human Experience

Exhale Dance Tribe’s opening performance of A Hypnotic Human Experience at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival starred company founders Missy Lay Zimmer and Andrew Hubbard in a mini-Broadway review with their lithe “tribe” of 11 toned dancers. The piece dazzled in nine short vignettes, easily conveying their audience to that magic place where oversize emotion reigns supreme and the physicality of the young movers onstage is mesmerizing.

Dancing to recorded music heavy on guitars and female vocalists such as Brandi Carlile, Mindy Smith and Tori Amos, with a little Pop and Hip Hop, these confident and engaging performers turned the small performing space in the Contemporary Arts Center’s black box theater into a theater for the signature Exhale style of attack, emotion and attitude that makes this troupe one of the most innovative and enjoyable to hit the Cincinnati scene in some time.

Aside from a brief showing from choreographers Zimmer and Hubbard in a duet (Hubbard is nursing an injured foot), the stage belonged to nine young women who demonstrated preternatural poise and virtuosity in a blend of Hip Hop, African, jazzy and modern movements. Whether they were quick, slow, playful, sinuous, strutting, yearning, sharp, or pleading, there was a sensitivity and camaraderie between the performers that drew on the shared mastery of their stunningly flexible limbs, their centeredness and their joyfulness as they flung themselves from deeply grounded positions into sharply whipping turns and explosive leaps.

Standout soloists Alessandra Marconi, Kristen Malarky and Mia Deweese each took an emotion and ran with it, though their performances sometimes outclassed the concept of the dance. And, if in some of the ensemble work, I felt as if I was seeing the culminating moment of a show without quite knowing what exactly that show was about — that didn’t make it any less fun to watch.

The most astonishing segment was one in which there was no movement whatsoever. In “Everything In Its Right Place,” we saw everyday reality as a grim progression in the style of short news photos. It was illuminating to watch a changing series of imaginary but resonant motionless tableaux in which the dancers were caught mid-gesture in a representative series of innocent group scenes like talking or eating which gradually morphed into archetypal recreations of violence and horror. It was left to the viewer to make connections between them.

A Hypnotic Human Experience was, in fact, pretty hypnotic and certainly human, drawing as it did on young movers giving nothing less than their all in performances that seemed to come from the center of their being. Grade: A

— Kathy Valin

I Do ... I Think

Nearly 20 minutes into her one-woman show about the panics and perils of getting married, Amanda Thompson relates the shady history of the wedding veil. It’s a funny but pitiful accusation against ancient fathers who, while stuck with one plain daughter amid a brood of beauties, would switch the engaged girl for the ugly one, using the veil to disguise the deceit before the ceremony.

Thompson, who has split her show into two halves — one prior to the wedding, the other a year after — laces her time onstage with a series of anecdotes, most of them personal. With the sole exception of the history lesson mentioned above, they all avoid pathos and go straight for the chuckle. And most of the time she gets what she goes for.

Some stories fare better than others. Thompson has moments of keen observation, and her comparison of the rabid female customers at a discount bridal outlet to a variety of dogs is a virtual howl. But while she has an appealing way of telling a tale and looks fine in her wedding attire, Thompson rarely moves her subject beyond the petulant and superficial. And that is what saddened me most about this show: It really isn't about marriage at all, but a litany of one’s annoyances rather than relationships. It is a show about one person, not two.

Solo endeavors of this sort work best when the lone performer is willing to move beyond herself, either by impersonating a host of other characters, such as Sarah Jones’ Bridge and Tunnel, or by placing her focus and sympathies on the trials of another, as in the current Broadway show The Year of Magical Thinking, which features Vanessa Redgrave in a script by Joan Didion.

In Thompson’s piece, her husband is rarely referred to — his name is mentioned no more than once or twice — while an entire sitcom-style showdown with the mother in-law at a supermarket is related in knee-slapping detail. There were plenty in the audience who found this "High Noon at the Kroger corral" episode to be hilarious. But I felt that deeper and more humorous opportunities were missed — stories about discovering the real person that you have just united your life with, about how you change or decide not to, about how you start to build a present and a future together.

Publicity for I Do … I Think says Thompson was struck by the realization that newlyweds spend so much time, effort and money preparing for the wedding and then find themselves unprepared for the marriage. There is a lot in that statement, and not much — if any — of it is actually in the show. Of course, it’s her material, and she has the right to play it however she wants.

Still, I felt like one of those disappointed grooms who raise the veil only to find that the girl he wanted is gone. Grade: C+

— Nicholas Korn

Contains Adult Themes

Kristin Larsen, the creator of Contains Adult Themes, is to be commended for the riskiness of its subject matter and the originality of its conception. On the other hand, the play loses points for the somewhat sloppy execution of its ideas, in terms of both script and acting. Larsen, truly a fireball of young talent, needs to discipline both script and performance to consistently grab an audience.

The first of two short plays is "The Rest Is Up to You," concerning a young teenager who acquires a ventriloquist’s monkey named Maroon. Maroon keeps suggesting things to the girl, Inne, and she seems to take everything he says at face value. Most of what Maroon says seems calculated to take Inne’s innocence away, but the identity of this trickster is never actually revealed.

Since Inne does the talking for Maroon, its possible that this character is actually her own inner voice. Or it could be the voice of peers, urging her to face up to facts. When Inne goes to her first dance, her date, Tony, moves her around like a marionette. Perhaps Inne has reached a stage in her life when the domination of her inner voice (Maroon) is replaced by male domination (Tony). I was never quite sure.

The longer of the two plays is "In My Dresser Drawer." The drawer contains knives, scissors and other cherished cutting instruments. In this piece Larsen plays an older teenager, seeming more like a punk than a young innocent. Her character, Cid, is constantly arguing about chewing gum (a euphemism for self-mutilation) with someone called Verbal Communication, which might have been a dream figure or possibly part of her inner self, perhaps her superego.

Larsen gives Verbal an extremely high-pitched and grating voice, so strained that it’s difficult for her to express anything with a semblance of a nuanced speech. When Verbal gets around to shadow-dancing behind a screen, the effect was initially exciting: Larsen affixes to her fingers knives that look for all the world like Edward Scissorhands. But the shadow play goes on forever, accompanied by intoned, indecipherable poetry making it quite unpalatable.

"The Airport Pieces" is an overlong, dull, discursive and an unnecessary interruption to "In My Dresser Drawer," material supposedly written by Cid as a creative outlet for her frustrated energies. The script is not as funny as it needs to be, and in general Larsen needs to take more time, elongating and filling out the moments, making every moment count.

The most powerful scene occurred at the play’s end, when Cid opens her top dresser drawer and lovingly lays her favorite cutting instruments on the floor. Larsen pulls down much softer and slower here, explaining to the audience in a measured, matter-of-fact tone just why this young woman feels compelled to cut herself. Cid is not suicidal: “The knives absorb the hurt that seems to be happening all the time.”

The problem with the two pieces is not that they are experimental, not that they play around with space and time and not that they're sometimes inexplicable. Creativity certainly abounds with elements such as the ventriloquist’s dummy, the shadow-dancing, and even the studied display of cutting implements and their use.

The problem resides in the fact that there are too many arid stretches that do not hold the attention of the audience. It’s possible to manipulate audience attention and response quite a lot these days, but a performer must be in precise control of how she’s doing it. Grade: C+

— Mark Sterner

I Take It Back

Fringe shows — by virtue of their low-budget, no-frills productions and because they tend to cater to “left of center” political mindsets — always feel like the theatrical equivalent of great liberal column-writing. Issues of the day can be dissected, investigated and ranted about in a thoughtful and usually entertaining way. Just like a good column.

So goes I Take It Back, the well-written and enjoyable political romp from CCM alum Stacey Morrison, directed by her friend and former CCM classmate Amelia Henderson. As the title suggests, the show is essentially the personal, autobiographical tale of what led Morrison to cast her vote in the 2004 presidential election for George W. Bush — and how she has regretted that decision ever since.

The show opens in the dark while Morrison’s voicemail rings out with each passing reminder to vote that she received that fateful day some three years ago. Then out runs the enthusiastic actress, wearing a vaguely patriotic hoodie and a big Julia Roberts smile. Morrison is exactly what you want from a solo performance artist: energy personified.

She jumps about, uses her space and brings a physicality to a show that could easily have been minimally (boringly) staged. Instead, her spunk pushes the piece along.

After showing us her reaction to the election results that day (yes, she violently vomits), Morrison takes us back in time to show what brought her there. And in doing so, the audience is introduced to all manner of funny characters from her past — her mother, her husband, the register-to-vote lady at a high school assembly who asks her simply, “Are you an R or D?”

Surely one of the more provocative scenes in I Take It Back revolves around Morrison’s giving in to her more conservative husband’s political leaning leading up to the election. Much to her elation, she found that the more she agreed (or perhaps kept mum) the hotter the action in the bedroom. Watching her get off — amid a veritable Kama Sutra of positions — to conservative talk radio snippets is practically worth the price of admission.

And so she sums up her reasons for voting for Bush thusly: pervasive talk radio, fear and a needy vagina. And that leads to the show’s central flaw, or at least its major challenge.

By show’s end, I felt zero empathy toward Morrison. She can regret the vote and write it off knowing that hers was not the margin of defeat. But perhaps in some way, despite her winning personality, she knows she is actually the show’s bad guy.

She knows her reasons for voting for Bush were paper-thin, at best. And of course, despite some funny efforts including a letter to Bush and a voicemail to Ken Blackwell, she also knows there’s no recourse. So the whole “take it back” premise is a little disingenuous.

But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe, like a good political column, I Take It Back is more of a reminder of how it happened so that future voters aren’t doomed to repeat that chapter in history. Grade: B

— Rodger Pille

True + False

During this performance's 90 swift minutes, seven players dish up a dozen biographical sketches, all of them plausible, only half of them literally true. The show challenges audience members to distinguish between factual truth and what merely appears to be true. After each sketch the audience votes with “T” or “F” flashcards and the tally is recorded. At the end of each performance, the collective wisdom of the audience is announced.

On opening night (May 31) audience perception was correct about only three stories, wrong about nine. The following night the audience was right about three, but not the same three. To keep word from leaking and affecting the votes of future audiences, they never reveal which votes are correct. That also keeps you pondering after the curtain comes down. Producer-director-performer Ted Bechtel said after the Friday show that Cincinnati audiences seem a little more credulous than others.

This entertaining, audience-involving, grin-provoking concept plays with perception and maintains a positive sense of the absurd and the outrageous. Here the comedy is refined, there it’s rowdy. Only rarely does it toy gently with its target. And the social criticism is scathing.

The show is perfectly suited to the out-there atmosphere of a Fringe, but it’s also sturdy enough to have played an extended run as an independent, off-Loop attraction drawing audiences against Chicago competition.

Eight people take stage in front of a wall of video monitors that, prior the show, use live, taped and looped images to play now-you-see-yourself-now-you-don’t games with of the audience as it assembles for each performance. Three of the eight (Allan Acquino-Quiaoit, Erin Liston and Andrew Schneider) double as players and manipulators of extensive video, sound and lighting effects that support the performance. Roger Bechtel (who fronts Big Picture Group and teaches theater at Miami University), David Getzin, Jeremy Schaefer and Shannon Welling are the other players. Stephanie Ehemann stage manages the rest of them.

Getzin spins a deliciously absurdist tale about walking down Clark Street in Chicago, meeting a man carrying a huge fish and taking him along to a homeless center where the cook turns it into a feast. True? False? Who knows? Welling says she lied to a date about being a champion horsewoman, only to discover that his family bred and raised horses. In a harrowing ride she learned how to whisper to the horse. She also describes appearing in a hyper-Teutonic musical production of Hansel and Gretel in which she played a kazoo and did a song and dance about sauerkraut. One of those tales is literally true. Which? Who knows?

Acquino-Quiaoit talks about contracting herpes. Then he describes about how cruel Spanish invaders in the Philippine Islands set off the series of protest events that produced his unusual last name. With luck, it’s the second one that’s true.

Bechtel tells how, as a student at Yale, he worked as a waiter at a fraternity dinner. A certain President of the United States, drunk out of his mind, turned obstreperous, threw a punch that missed Bechtel and hit a female caterer. There’s a bitterly ironic twist to the tale, not to be revealed here, that makes it frightening whether it’s true or false.

Relaxed and welcoming between sketches, True + False becomes intensely focused and perfectly paced when the tales are being twisted. Grade: A+

Note: Though it came and went quickly during the first weekend of Fringe 2007, True + False should be a contender for "Pick of the Fringe" honors. Since this edition of the show is ending its run with this engagement at the Cincinnati Fringe, Big Picture Group will finally reveal which stories are factual and which are fanciful after mid-June. Check their Web site for the answers.

— Tom McElfresh

Casualties

The 2007 Fringe offers a lot of choices in experimental works — music, dance, theater and more. What you find fewer of are traditionally constructed and presented plays.

Local playwright Sally Domet's Casualties provides an alternative to the alternatives, a brief but traditionally written story of Angie (Lauren Carter), a young woman we see from childhood through adult relationships from the 1950s to the 1970s. (The show has been minimally staged by director Mike Miller upstairs in the Over-the-Rhine club once called alchemize, at 1122 Walnut St. While the old sign still hangs over the entrance, the building is being converted into a soon-to-open bar, Below Zero.)

The play is a memory piece: Angie speaks directly to the audience, then enters into scenes in which we see her as a child, a teenager, a young adult and so on. The work is a bit more than an hour long; it uses nine actors, a sizeable cast for a Fringe production.

These facts add up to an occasionally satisfying performance of a script that doesn’t break much new ground. Angie’s circumstances — she’s a “casualty” of sexual abuse by her stepfather (Dan Britt) — is largely compared to the mental trauma still suffered by Rick (Tim Rhoades), a Vietnam vet who can’t shake the images of carnage he witnessed and participated in. Other characters haunting Angie’s memory include her grandmother (Kathie Labanz), her uncle (Troy Miller), a high-school acquaintance who becomes her first real romance (Aaron Kotte), an elderly psychic (Marian Weage) and a longtime friend of her grandmother (Karen Righter).

The cast list might suggest that Casualties is a full-length play, and if it were to be developed in that direction it might be more satisfying. Too often Angie tells us about momentous events rather than letting us see them happen. As several characters die, the actors portraying them remain onstage watching the action, as if lingering in Angie’s memory. That’s an interesting concept, but on a minimal stage with erratic lighting it’s more distracting than effective.

Angie’s path through difficult relationships is chronicled but not deeply felt. Adding to this lack of emotional texture is the fact that Carter has been directed to narrate the piece in a flat, clinical manner — perhaps reflecting the character’s emotional withdrawal. That results in moments such as her grandmother’s passing or her stepfather’s accidental death that should be deeply felt being described without appearing to affect the young woman.

Carter is a fine actress, ably portraying Angie in various stages of maturity, but we're robbed of her feelings during these crucial narrative moments. As a result, when Angie’s relationship with Rick ultimately crumbles (a turn of events that was never in doubt), her pain seems predictable rather than painful.

Domet is capable of artful writing: Over and over, characters talk about the concept of truth and what it means to them. Some are cynical, others yearning. Angie constantly seeks it — but at the conclusion of Casualties, I wasn’t certain whether she’d found it.

Too often the melodrama washes away good opportunities to dig deeper into these characters and their emotions. More focus, fewer characters and deeper feeling would make Casualties into a more compelling piece of theater. Grade: B-

— Rick Pender

Public Espionage

Although Le Petomane Theatre Ensemble hails from the tiny metropolis of Louisville, their current Fringe offering feels a lot like the sort of show that populates Chicago's smaller stages — a comedy-style revue that centers around an absurd but easily ingested premise that spins ridiculously out of control. For this outing, it's a school for spies.

The humor starts even before the show, as an actor dressed as a ninja shadows the Festival representative while he thanks the sponsors and delivers the obligatory announcements. From there, several actors planted in the audience reveal themselves as agents and take the stage, ordering a new recruit, “Agent X” (Abigail Bailey Maupin), into the training arena, which is really no more than a card table, a few folding chairs and odd assemblage of props.

Maupin plays the newbie agent as an inquisitive pixie who temporarily surrenders herself (but not her identity) to the ludicrous abuse heaped upon her by the outlandish faculty running the academy. Her mentors (or tormentors) include a Russian operative (Gregory Maupin), whose accent and pride are equally dense; the already revealed ninja (Kyle Ware), whose real name is Bugle and claims to be from a renegade Dutch detachment that is not officially recognized but sufficiently trained; a disguise consultant (Kristie Rolape) who is equal parts fascist and fashionista; and Tony Dingman and Heather Burns, who play Chase and Kitty, the pretentious head counselors of this sophomoric spy camp.

The Le Petomaniacs know enough not to make blunt declarations of every joke but allow the audience put the pieces together for themselves, such as the lesson on how to tap a phone call a la Savion Glover. It also helps that Le Petomane is an established troupe: The performers know the rhythm and limits of their fellow players, giving the anarchy of the scenes an underlying cohesion.

Most of the bits are intentionally loopy, like the “Sneaky Stealthy Song,” performed by Bugle, which opens with the line “When I think of stealthy sneak, I always think of me.” Or when Agent X asks for real meaning of spying, and her Russian instructor steps forward into a spotlight and recites from the scriptures, like Linus in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Le Petomane acclaims itself as a physical comedy troupe, and there are some witty visuals that make the most of the show’s spare resources. The best of these demonstrates how to flood a room with water using a single strand of rope, in addition to the high-speed water ski chase that follows.

Le Petomane and Cincinnati’s Performance Gallery (Girlfight) developed their Fringe programs in tandem, vowing to incorporate a list of 10 common items into each of their shows. I’ve seen both programs and discovered five. Maybe with a little more time at spy school I would have found more. Grade: B

— Nicholas Korn

Girlfight

This is not the edgy, urban and Hip Hop-inflected rant on race, class and gender that its title might suggest. Instead, the members of Cincinnati's Performance Gallery have assembled a strange and startling show that is cerebral and silly and, for the most part, a lot of fun to watch.

The action begins at the end and works backwards Memento-style, while an onstage flipchart tags each scene with a subtitle and time elapsed from the opening image of the show — the four cast members at each other’s throats in a frozen moment of comic aggression.

The series of scenes that follow record in reverse chronology a feud between two unnamed women — one a fast-talking, fastidious type-A socialite and the other a vegetarian neurotic with a fixation on the Dalai Lama. Local favorites Aretta Baumgartner and Regina Pugh play the opposing pair with a tense ferocity that makes you think either one could explode at any moment, while darting though a dizzy range of emotional peaks and valleys. These are great performances by two fiercely funny artists who know their craft.

George Alexander — who provides narration, mediation and the occasional male perspective — manages to the do the near-impossible by matching Baumgartner and Pugh beat for beat in delivery and drive. He gives almost every line a hilarious twist while powerfully, but playfully, sharing the stage without ever giving an inch of it away.

Director Brian Robertson does a terrific job keeping the pace and imagery crisp and electric. One scene that depicts the four characters riding a bus while actually seated on the four edges of a wooden cube, could be used as a textbook example of what the stage does best — engaging the imagination through suggestion rather than saturation.

Girlfight, however, is not without its faults, and they're as glaring as its strengths. One is the inclusion of several monologues presented by Jodie Linver about the loss of a husband and its aftermath. The topic and tone of these inserts feel forced and out of place, and they drain the energy out of the show. It doesn’t help that Linver’s voice dips into her lower register when she wants to sound emotional, making her delivery sometimes nearly inaudible.

Another disappointment is the overall structure of the storyline. Girlfight was developed from a series of improvisations, and while the individual scenes have been scripted with a rewarding level of detail, the shape of the show remains muddled and never really clarifies why these two different women became so intent on doing harm to one another.

Within the framework of the individual scenes, however, there are some terrific sequences, including how to kill someone with a cucumber and an encyclopedic entry on the owl and why it says “Who?”

As complete piece of theater, Girlfight isn't quite the sum of its parts. But some of its parts — such as the three lead performances, the direction and the writing of individual scenes — make it a blast and well worth fighting for a seat before the Fringe Festival closes. Grade: A-

— Nicholas Korn

Think Fast Go Slow

Musician Todd Juengling paints pictures with sound. In a dark room at 12th and Jackson streets in Over-the-Rhine, his one-man Fringe 2007 act sonically creates environments — even worlds — that can captivate and amuse. What he does seems almost magical.

Using modern recording and reproduction technology, Juengling makes a few sounds: He whistles or claps, thumps on a small resonant drum, taps a hammer or jingles a wind chime. His equipment captures the sound or the sequence and begins to loop it. Then he layers in something else, typically his acoustic or electric guitar, both of which he can play with artistry. He might lay down a melodic line or a bass riff several times. Then he puts down the instrument — but its sound eerily continues, as if it’s taken on a life of its own. He can accompany himself in this manner or add even more.

This process is already fascinating, but Juengling adds one more element: a memory game/toy from the 1980s called Simon. You might remember the gimmicky device if you think about it. About the size of a pie plate, a Simon has four differently colored lenses (red, blue yellow and green), which illuminate in random sequences, emitting an electronic tone to correspond. The challenge to the player is to repeat the sequence of lights and tones, which grows one at a time. Juengling has four Simons as part of his electronic “band,” and he uses them for musical numbers that seem unique.

Sometimes he starts with several of the Simons, laying down a rhythm bed of electronic beeps that he then accompanies on guitar. Because the Simon generates its patterns randomly, Juengling’s musical “partnering” becomes Jazz as he responds to the rhythm that’s been created. In one number, “Go Slow Stop Breathe,” he starts with more familiar sounds — whistling a bird song and an owl hoot — adds a melodic line from his acoustic guitar, gets them spinning in their own electronic loop and then begins to “play” the Simons, adding electronic tones to the stew of sound.

The result is music unlike anything I’ve heard before. That’s not to say it’s completely engaging: Sometimes Juengling lets it go on a tad too long, and over the course of 50 minutes in the dark he failed to offer enough variety to keep me fully engaged. But there are many lovely and fascinating moments.

His variations on the theme of “bells & whistles” open and close the set (with “Morning Bells” and “Evening Bells”) and provide an interlude in which he creates the sounds of “Traffic” — sirens, alarms and cars — made all the more intriguing by the rush of traffic whispering by on 12th Street. I liked “Erin’s Theme,” a more traditional melody that Juengling plays on acoustic guitar, slowly translating its bossa nova beat to the Simons.

The Simons’ sound can be jarring, because the musical tones are flat and without nuance. Sometimes Juengling compensates for that by blending with his more musical elements; sometimes he uses the effect to make his musical point. In “Think Fast Go Slow,” from which his show takes its name, he does both with interesting effect. In some numbers, I found myself jolted from one musical direction to another when the alien beeps intruded.

I suspect this is a musical mode that Juengling will continues to explore. I doubt we’ll ever have a concerto for Simon and symphony orchestra, but he has created sonic experiences that I’ll remember. I guess that memory element is another inheritance from the Simon. Grade: B

— Rick Pender

Tommy Nugent's The Show

Tommy Nugent spends a good deal of time onstage (and presumably off) wondering whether what he’s doing is theater. That’s pretty odd, considering that he’s a performer in a theater festival, albeit a fringe festival — but still.

And his piece is called Tommy Nugent’s The Show. When the word “show” is in a title, that’s a bit of a binding contract. Then again, everything about Nugent and his piece is a touch odd. And that, my friends, isn’t a bad thing.

Because what you have in The Show is a man who definitely isn’t constrained by the conventional trappings of theater. He sits in the audience during the pre-show speech. He admits out loud any number of times when a joke he delivers bombs. (“That was a lot funnier in my head just now.”) He also bases most of his act on magic tricks and self-realization exercises. The whole stew boils up to the moment where Nugent has to decide if he’s going to play a real-life round of Russian roulette in front of a live studio audience. The Sound of Music this ain’t.

A self-described traveling philosopher, Nugent uses The Show to describe his quirky, eventful life to this point and talks eloquently about living in the cycle, circling around and around the same behavior. Each bounce-back, though, gets a little tougher, he says. He admits with a small glint of self-deprecating pride that his two previous occupations in essence led him to a life of performance: magician and preacher.

“I combined the world’s two cheesiest professions,” he says.

The performance hits its stride — and arguably peaks — in those first few moments of the show. Nugent attempts what he calls “the card trick of death.” Really that just means doing sleight of hand while shackled in a straitjacket. It’s impressive, funny and creates some great performer-audience energy. One wishes there were more stunts like that peppered throughout the piece.

Not that Nugent lets up. He is having fun, that much is clear. He smiles, laughs at his own jokes. He gets worked up and a vein going right down the center of his forehead bulges. He’s into his show. Theater or not.

But the second half loses its way when Nugent takes out the gun and explains what was to be his big “performance art” finale. Breaking surely some kind of illusionist code, he details how he figured out a way to use a real gun and a real bullet and play Russian roulette with a 98-99 percent chance of success. But recent headlines and a phone call from his wife convinced him to reconsider. Or at least to acknowledge that a 98 percent success rate still means a 2 percent chance of failure.

But failure surely means some form of theatrical immortality.

What to do? To pull the trigger or not, that is the question. Without spoiling the surprise, or at least the compromised ending that Nugent and his family could live with, it’s clear that this is an edited draft of a script.

The ending doesn’t have that necessary bang, but rather a loud dull thud. It’s still marginally interesting though somewhat unsatisfying. After a promising start, that can also be said of The Show in general. Grade: C

— Rodger Pille

WOOF! The Road Show

This anti-romantic gay romance will be enjoyed by straights and gays alike because it’s not the typical boy-meets-boy tale and has some heft gained by an earnest treatment of why love often seems to go nowhere. Jerry Rabushka contributed book, music and lyrics to this musical play. He plays Jon as well. Zach Jett plays Adam and executes most of the singing and dancing.

Jon and Adam are stuck in rehearsal hell for a show that's touring somewhere but never seems to arrive. Jon is immediately head over heels for Adam, but Adam doesn’t reciprocate, preferring the affections of the licentious stagehand Woody. In the opening number Adam sings, “I’ll Never Say I Love You,” and we’re thinking, “Yeah, right, unless this is unlike every other musical we’ve ever seen.”

At this point the WOOF! metaphor is delineated. At first I thought that gays were being compared to dogs in general, which wouldn’t be politically correct, but later I understood that all men are like dogs in that they're attracted to whatever captures their attention. And there’s a corollary: In relationships between two men, they rarely want each other when they’re actually together in the same place at the same time.

So Jon and Adam go on rehearsing. The rehearsal scenes spill into real life, and vice versa, so that you can’t always tell which is which. We do know that there is a kiss on page 19, so Jon always wants to rehearse that page. Unfortunately for Jon, however, it states in Adam’s contract that he is forbidden to have sex with Jon. So the three of them go on in a No Exit kind of limbo, with nobody being truly satisfied.

Rabushka and Jett have a magnetic attraction onstage, even though the magnetism is often reversed. Jon isn't shy in declaring his love for the hunky Adam and uses as many ruses as he can think of to get him into bed. But Adam keeps coming up with different excuses. For example, if Woody is no longer an issue, then Adam reveals that he has personally been making pancakes from scratch for a certain scene in the show and Jon didn’t even notice. How could this be love?

There is a very real no-win situation underneath the silliness, and the play occasionally underscores it. Most of this sentiment is expressed in the songs. Gay men have, for example, developed hardened skins to mask the hurt of early relationships. Too much love expressed too early in a relationship is repellent. Most see true love as a dream, an unreal, unattainable fantasy.

I mentioned the similarity of the play to Sartre’s No Exit. I was also struck by some similarities to the Samuel Beckett’s absurdist classic Waiting for Godot. Here we have two scruffy men (both have a good deal of facial hair) trapped in a situation they don’t understand. They keep recycling lines such as “I really do love you” and “But I’m a professional, I have to honor my contract,” and they keep jumping from reality to rehearsal in a way that’s impossible to track.

Since Adam claims the play they’re touring has been workshopped to death, maintaining that “Workshopping is changing hell,” I am hesitant to suggest any changes. Nevertheless, I wasn’t sure if the lack of clarity in the shifting between reality and rehearsals was intentional. If not, clearer blocking and transitions would set up the shifts. If lack of clarity was what was intended, this needs to be clarified as well, if you know what I mean. In any case, movement and timing should generally be cleaner and crisper.

There is enough artistic and intellectual substance, as well as pure entertainment value, to warrant a visit to this fringe production. Rabushka’s songs energize the performance; the use of this medium gives it an extra dimension. Jett sings and moves well, using expansive gestures and facial expression. Grade: B

— Mark Sterner

On Edge

The program for playwright Stephen Hunter’s On Edge announces that this world premiere production was “Collaboratively Directed by (the) cast.” That goes a ways toward explaining the wandering pace, the featureless blocking, the indiscriminate gestures, the missed entrances and the one-note performances in which vehemence and high volume attempt but fail to substitute for genuine high emotion.

Not that the most sensitive direction in the world is likely to have clarified the jumbled plot or made the romance novel characters and their irrational motivations any more credible.

Here’s the drill: Brothers Oscar and Marcus are (respectively) a scrambling, conniving con artist selling knockoff purses off a throw rug on a New York City sidewalk and a baseball superstar who plays for the Yankees and is about to hit his 600th home run. The brothers adamantly do not communicate. Haven’t for years. Their father deserted them but left them with matching rings to remember him by. Damn thoughtful of him.

Marcus was the jock prince of their high school, driving a Caddy and banging cheerleaders by the backseat full while bookish Oscar was president of the National Honor Society chapter, drove a crapped-out Pinto and dated an enigmatically smiling apprentice alcoholic named Lisa. Supposedly he’s headed for Harvard but doesn’t make it.

Ten years later, Oscar is living with but still not sleeping with Lisa while he supports her and her 10-year-old son. Guess who is actually the boy’s father? Guess who is also still sleeping with Lisa, though he calls her Mona. Get it? And guess who is injecting steroids and/or other performance enhancing drugs while lying about it to Yankees management, the fans and the media?

Does this drivel get more or less believable when Oscar catches Marcus and Mona/Lisa in their underwear, discovers the current cuckoldry and the boy’s true parentage, watches his brother shoot up and then outs all of it on talk radio? How believable is it when the now discredited baseball stud confesses that all through high school he envied Oscar?

Sidled up to the piffle above is a promising sub-plot in which obsessed baseball fan Jace, otherwise a likeable dude, allows his obsession with Marcus to supplant and ultimately destroy his relationship with the woman he genuinely loves. Carefully explored and explicated that would make a more fascinating play than the brothers plot.

Some genuinely able people are caught up and wasted in On Edge. Jeffrey K. Miller has a street-wise, attractively smart-alecky way with dialogue that crackles in Oscar’s early scenes but turns repetitive even before he gets swamped in the rising tide of pathos. Justin Adams rounds out Jace nicely, giving his obsession a wry comic undertow and an occasional reality check in which he realizes that he’s destructively over the edge but is unable to curb his mania. S. Elizabeth Carrol does good things with the little she has to work with as the woman who loves Jace but cuts him loose. Others in the cast are Josh Beshears (Marcus), Colleen Sketch (Mona/Lisa) and the self-directing playwright as the radio host. Grade: C-

— Tom McElfresh

How to Fake a Clinical Depression

You know you’re into something good from the very first moments of the performance of this work. Steven Marrocco has a likeable, unassuming presence, like an old friend or your favorite old hound. He is, however, completely in control of the evening. His voice is resonant and expressive, a small tilt of the head carries a subtle but provocative meaning and the entire performance is crisply coordinated but still relaxed. Marrocco stays in the same moment as the audience, which doesn’t mind eating from the palm of his hand.

How to Fake a Clinical Depression was directed with a very deft touch by Shulie Cowan, who teaches at Second City Los Angeles. Autobiographical in nature, it’s an apt vehicle for Marrocco’s sense of humor and his considerable acting talents. After receiving a degree in acting from New York University, he returned to L.A., eventually winding up in a tanning salon between more promising gigs.

In need of money and a new bass guitar — he is also an accomplished musician — Marrocco comes across an ad for a clinical depression study on Craigslist. This is the beginning of his tale of woe at the hands of Glaxo Smith Klein, or “Big Pharma,” as he calls the drug companies that are currently the biggest pill pushers in history. He decides to answer the ad and is called in for “Depression Study. Day One. The Audition.”

This is where we meet Danielle, the generously endowed drug company assistant with whom Marrocco is immediately smitten. He does a sultry walk to introduce us to Danielle. The walk is evocatively suggestive in several of the right places, but it doesn’t try to duplicate Danielle — a small thing, but one in a series of right choices.

Marrocco has a 20-minute interview with Dr. Monjak, an interview that all too easily determines his fate as a clinically depressed subject. He differentiates between these two characters quickly, cleanly and comically, without ever sacrificing the reality of his inner misgivings. He is, of course, faking depression to get the financial reward. Nevertheless, he agrees to begin taking a combination of Prozac (an anti-depressant) and Zyprexa (an anti-psychotic used for schizophrenia).

Marrocco says he always has disaster movies playing in his head, a way of working through his natural anxiety. The films no longer work for him because of the drugs. He begins to feel a general numbness and is no longer able to cry — a bad sign for an actor. Four weeks into the study, he experiences the “minor” side effects of nightmares, excessive gas and impotence. Dr. Monjak doubles Marrocco’s dosage and takes off for a weekend with Danielle.

You get the drift. What began as an acting job turned into a personal nightmare, all due to a very dangerous combination of drugs from a doctor. And Big Pharma. It’s alternately frightening and hilarious to witness the actor interpreting his own grim experience. The performance is never less than highly entertaining and emotionally engaging, and it’s nice to see the big drug companies getting theirs in the end. Grade: A

— Mark Sterner

Calculus: The Musical

Call this High School Musical: The Math Years. Of course, it remains to be seen whether music and popular melodies would have helped me catch on to calculus in high school. I rather doubt it. But seeing Mr. Menkhaus try certainly would have made it more fun.

So Calculus: The Musical attempts, in a remarkably ebullient way, to make something empirically un-fun fun. You simply have to credit the creators Marc Gutman and Sadie Bowman (who double as the performers) for their game try. Whether it entirely works is somewhat in question.

Staged appropriately in a classroom at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Calculus: The Musical sets out to explain the history of calculus and some of the defining principles in a flip, Gen-X way. Isaac Newton plays with an action figure of himself (throwing it up and watching it fall) as he ponders instantaneous velocity. Thus begins the journey.

With a sparse set and either a keyboard or guitar as accompaniment, the two actors plow through scenes and songs, ripping through moments in math history at breakneck speed. They quite clearly know that, for the show to succeed at all, it won’t have time to pause and let the audience wonder what just happened. Let’s be honest: The majority of the Fringe crowd are neither math students nor teachers. And they’re probably, like me, too many years removed from the classroom to get any of the “in jokes.” So the genesis of the show — as a mnemonic tool for Gutman’s teaching — makes sense. Practically applied to a Fringe festival? Well, maybe not.

But it is clever. Bowman, specifically, is a pretty solid musician and singer. And the slideshows and videos that supplement the staging are endearing in their extreme low-budget way. (Special props for the Mr. T and Ghostbusters references during the song “Power Rule.”)

Note that all the songs should sound extremely familiar. Gutman and Bowman hijack popular melodies from artists as far-flung as Gilbert and Sullivan to Red Hot Chili Peppers, from The Beatles to They Might Be Giants. Again, the charm of the show — at least for the mathematically challenged — isn’t how they managed to rhyme some oddball math terms together (e.g., “I know that you got Sigma Notation/When your slices add in a big summation”). It’s how accessible the creators have made those concepts by shoehorning them into an Eminem tune.

In my preview for this show I wrote that whether or not it’s any good seems secondary to witnessing first-hand how the creators manage to pull this off. I was right. It might not be great theater in either the traditional or the Fringe sense of the word, but like some 19th-century curiosity show it’s something you just feel compelled to experience. Grade: B-

— Rodger Pille

Alone Together

Think about an elaborately painted urn. Then think about dropping it. It breaks, and the pieces scatter across the floor. The whole is irretrievable.

But if you examine one of the pieces you can, in your mind’s eye, reconstruct the whole that was from the fragment in your hand. If you examine a series of different shards, however, your reconstructions are likely to be similar but never identical.

In just such an examine-the-pieces manner playwright/director Ted Brengle’s intense, non-linear playlet Alone Together investigates the faltering relationship between Miranda (Courtney Maistros) and Walter (Josh Stamoolis). It begins with a brief confrontation that’s hyper-realistic in tone. Miranda is manic about choosing new colors to paint the apartment walls, and there’s an absurdist focus on a cardboard box full of junk. Lighting designed by Scott Hopkins shifts. Another confrontation. Whether it’s earlier or later in the relationship is unclear and doesn’t matter. The argument is mostly the same but slightly different.

Walter goes behind the couch, forgetting about and stumbling over a pet cat named Mischief who lurks back there. Then he does it again. A different incident? Or a different reconstruction of the same incident from an altered perspective? Again, unclear — and it doesn’t matter a damn’s worth. What matters is that Walter and Miranda have dropped the urn. The whole that was them is history, but they can’t get done examining the pieces.

Playwright Brengle, a master of arts candidate in Miami University’s theater department, has produced an accomplished piece of work. (Simultaneously with the Cincinnati Fringe Festival performances a different production of the piece is appearing in a one-act play festival in New York.)

One-acts are notoriously difficult to write. With the non-linear, reflexive structure well under control, he gives his characters interest and depth, sets up a situation, develops it, revealing more and more fragments of the failed relationship as he builds toward a climax, then closes out on a dying fall. All of that gets done in 36 minutes peppered with neat, tight accusations and regrets:

“Some people want to be an open book. I don’t.”

“For a while I made a difference for you.”

“No man ever really knows a woman, but I know you.”

Director Brengle has, on the other hand, fielded an uneven production on a makeshift set. The exigencies of Fringe-level production led to it, but it's often not the best idea for a playwright to direct his or her own work.

Here the pace is on the rackety side, and the performances are ill-matched. As Walter, Stamoolis (who was impressive throughout the last Cincinnati Shakespeare Company season, particularly in The Dumb Waiter) blends hurt, anger and longing into a fetching portrait of loss. As Miranda, Miami University student Maistros is chattery and flat, speed-reading along with little inflection, supplying too little fear to undergird the woman’s mania and too little warmth to create empathy. A firmer directorial hand might have fixed that. Grade: B

— Tom McElfresh

iLove:

Be prepared to analyze any and every romantic relationship you’ve ever had. Maybe you’ll shoot one of your friends an e-mail or text message after doing so, and that will precisely prove New Stage Collective’s (NSC) point with this production, that our cultural environment informs — in many cases dictates — everything we do, specifically love.

Created by The Satori Group for NSC, iLove: takes on some heady topics: how we live in and around love in a technologically advancing society; how we define love; how we change as Americans; and how all of these facts affect each other. And it’s not all idealized imagery; being alone is part of it. (The show was originally titled Alone, Together, but because of the similarly named Fringe piece, Alone Together, Satori, an ensemble of CCM grads and students, made the change.)

The production was inspired by playwright Charles Mee’s (Re)making project, wherein he encourages artists to sample his works and create new works as a result. His play, Fêtes de la Nuit, was the starting point, and then Satori workshopped and developed it into their “unoriginal, original” work.

Words from Barack Obama, Richard Linklater, Björk and others are strung throughout, as are videos, phone and computer conversations and music. It’s fitting that, with our increased multi-tasking and instant access to information, the story is told through brief scenes, dance sequences and songs.

Past Fringe attendees will find iLove: compositionally similar to previous efforts of Matt Slaybaugh (Available light [theatre] and BlueForms Theatre Group). The excellent cast — Anthony Darnell, Adam Standley, Adrienne Clark, Lindsey Valitchka, Charlie Clark and the ensemble — interact effortlessly, which results in much provoked thought.

For example, when Standley and Charlie Clark’s characters find themselves in an actual in-person conversation about friendship — and Standley’s character, of a younger generation, goes on at length about all of his varied e-connections — they wonder if losing a friend you’ve never actually met in person is really losing a friend at all. The younger man holds that it is.

Another recurring thought is the difference between the who and the what. “Do we love people for who they are or for what they are?”

Other notable moments occur during two euphoric, nostalgic Hollywood-styled dance sequences (to “Singin’ in the Rain”) that become iPod commercials and cyber sex involving a 32- and a 15-year-old (“but we have a good connection,” the ’tween whines). Oh, and there’s nudity.

The set design is slick, too — costumes are primarily black, white and red; lights are used as props; a dry-erase board revolves to help signify a new scene (as well as mimic a Web browser). But a show about love is going to have its clichés, which are the only times we check our watch. “If you love someone, let them go” can only be said so many times.

That said, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if this show sells out. Grade: B+

— Jessica Canterbury

Pulse: The Ensemble Project

Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati (ETC) brings together a handful of recent theater grads annually to provide backstage assistance and understudy professional actors in ETC’s regular season productions. These interns gain valuable experience, perhaps the best of which is to be part of a showcase at season’s end that they not only perform in but write original material for.

This year’s group — JoLen Carlos, Daniel East, Ben Kaufman, Michael Miller, Elizabeth Simmons, Ashley Turin and Lance Willoughby — seem especially adept at athletic stage movement, a performance dimension that director Cheryl Maxine Couch has used for the opening and closing sequence of Pulse in addition to choreographed scene transitions between the dozen or so brief pieces presented. While ETC has done a year-end showcase annually for several seasons, this is the first time it’s been offered as a Fringe production. The 70-minute compilation is worth seeing.

As ETC’s D. Lynn Meyers noted on the performance’s opening night, these works are — in the vein of ETC’s stock-in-trade — all world premieres. Some are a tad pretentious, but several are very engaging, and a couple are comic pieces that audiences will love.

The piece I expect everyone will remember is “Typical Shituations,” which places three toilets in spotlight-defined stalls onstage. Two women (Carlos and Simmons) find themselves trapped without toilet paper; a third (Turin) can barely be pried from her cell phone to help them. Then the scene turns to the men’s room (where cell-phone girl goes briefly for supplies — and transition), where we witness an angst-ridden conversation about urban gentrification that’s clearly informed by the rapid pace of development in Over-the-Rhine in the blocks around ETC. It’s a well-written and well performed set of sketches, perhaps because the restroom setting is one where conversations have an overlay of behavior not evident elsewhere.

“Just-a-Tic” has a Samuel Beckett-esque flavor: Familiar phrases and thoughts are strung together in ways that make linguistic sense but ultimately seem abstract and empty because they don’t relate back to a concrete situation. “I am restless, and you are boring my teeth out,” one character shouts as the two women (Carlos and Turin) argue about an imaginary cat named Demetrius.

Lance Willoughby has written several angry monologues which he performs, one in a straitjacket, another about a “Breakdown” as a break-through. “Lasting Scars” is a set of interlaced monologues about girlhood friendships that have become more complex as young adults, and “Don’t Get Married” is about a young woman who finds herself in love with her best friend, who’s engaged to be married.

Humor is present in many skits, too. One of the toilets returns for “Call the Plumber,” a piece about the futility of modern existence played out through comic stereotypes. “Wuza-Uman” is about the creation of a Frankenstein-like woman (she “was a human”) who might have the solution to peace and love — if only people can beyond their horror.

There are a few poetic moments and soundscapes that felt too indulgent to me, but that’s the nature of young artists trying on different modes of writing and performance styles. All are well presented — these are seven fine young actors — and with ETC’s high professional standards. It’s a good, if miscellaneous, glimpse of the future of theater. Grade: B+

— Rick Pender

The Killing State

At Xavier University, there’s an ongoing and serious conversation about the ethics of capital punishment. That dialogue is captured in this performance, directed by Cathy Springfield, which opens with Professor Patrick Welage (who directs XU’s Peace and Justice Program) re-creating his Day One lecture to a class of students who come to learn more about a justice system that executes criminals.

Molly Boehringer-Brown and Scotty Alison first play two students in Welage’s class. Each is assigned a pen pal who is a prisoner on Ohio’s Death Row. She is clearly in the anti-death penalty camp; he believes in executing those convicted of horrific crimes. But neither one has anything but stereotypical views formed from TV shows and movies.

Their correspondence with two inmates, Velma and Victor, provides considerably more texture for their understanding. Most of the hour-long show has Boehringer-Brown as Velma and Alison as Victor giving voice to letters the prisoners send to the two students. It’s clear that their words are informed by — and likely literally drawn from — real letters. The inmates each defend their acts and voice opinions about their circumstances; it becomes harder to condemn them as their personalities and humanity take shape, even if their guilt is evident, especially in Victor’s case.

Their potential for growth and redemption is also an element of this production. Both are people who have grown and matured; it’s easy to imagine their potential to be people who regret their crimes and might contribute to society.

The Killing State is interlaced with video presentations: a recreation of the rape and murder scene from Dead Man Walking; a recording of Ron Keine, a man who spent two years on Death Row before being exonerated; and a vigil in Lucasville, Ohio, prior to the execution of a convicted killer. Each serves a purpose and is well presented, although Keine’s edited remarks aren't visually interesting and go on longer than necessary. The genuine emotion of the vigil participants — especially Cincinnati's own Sr. Alice Gerdeman, C.D.P, a death penalty opponent, to whom the production is dedicated — is effectively captured by the video and is especially moving.

This is the kind of polemic piece that’s perfectly and appropriately at home in a fringe festival. There’s no doubt about the sentiments of those involved in staging this work — which is minimally presented at InkTank — especially when a gurney with a body is rolled out and left at center stage following their curtain call. But we see how both students become engaged at a more personal level to form more realistic opinions because of their contact with the prisoners. We witness how person-to-person communication raises doubts about the validity and the justice of a state that kills its citizens. I’m not certain that this performance will change anyone’s attitudes, but it will certainly provide a clearer picture of the issues.

Boehringer-Brown and Allison offer textured performances as the inmates. Velma is angry, volatile and sensitive, self-aware and selfishly defensive at the same time. Victor vacillates between normal interests like baking and reading to anger at being bypassed by Court TV and further condemned by the results of a DNA sample. During the latter episode, we hear chilling evidence of his ruthless side.

Both actors are less convincing as the simplistic students, but that’s OK. The Killing State is making a point, and these young people are the means to an end. The memorable letters rendered as monologues are the meat of this performance. Grade: B 

— Rick Pender

Wet Dream

This work, a Jamming Talent production presented by Theatre for a New City, is a string of loosely assembled performers inspired by Cirque du Soleil and populated by performers that include members of Barnyard Burlesque with a soundtrack largely of electronic melodies by Henry McHenry. There is modest connective tissue to Wet Dream, but not much of a story: A young woman, Veronica (Ashley Michalos), stumbles into her bedroom late at night, swilling wine from a bottle. She listens to an answering machine message from an angry lover who's given up on her after one more act of unfaithful behavior, sings a bluesy song and falls asleep. The rest of the performance (about 40 minutes) is the surreal stuff of her dreams.

Some of it is disturbing, some amusing and some simply incomprehensible. There’s an emphasis on bizarre costumes and intriguing props. Several individual components — two acts of aerial dancing, a routine involving two flaming balls on chains about a yard long that are spun and swung with increasing speed and a woman dancing with a glowing hula hoop — are rendered with considerable skill.

Other scenes seem are oddly sinister and vaguely sexual: Someone creeps into bed with Veronica and might be having sex (or at least some kind of sensual encounter), but as they wrestle under a sheet the effect is as comic as it is erotic. A surgeon (Sweet Hayseed) and a nurse (Jenn-O-Side) appear for a climactic ballet involving a gigantic hypodermic syringe and a capsule the size of duffel bag. Are we meant to frightened or amused?

Chris Wesselman (who played chunky Dave Bukatinsky in New Stage Collective’s The Full Monty last summer) appears as a clown in a cloud of balloons that he gradually pops until he’s wearing little more than a Speedo. The soundtrack for his routine is Louis Prima’s “Just a Gigolo” pairing with “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” and it’s funny. But it’s too long.

That’s a problem with much of the material in Wet Dream: Too many elements simply go on without much reason. The content of various elements might be clever, but they lack the substance or variety that will sustain interest.

Wet Dream’s biggest deficit, however, is sloppiness. Sound quality is wildly uneven: Michalos’ song in the opening scene is hard to hear over the recorded soundtrack; in the next scene, a live rendition of the Eurythmics is so loud it’s distorted. Scene changes and video imagery are choppy.

The entire performance appears under-rehearsed. When Michalos awoke from Veronica’s dream for the curtain call, she stood onstage awkwardly then had to gesture to others in the cast to take their bows. Several performances seem dangerously conceived: Sweet Hayseed took an unplanned fall because she was unsteady on her glowing platform heels.

Even skillfully performed elements took longer than necessary. The swift transitions of dreams are what’s needed, not the tedious repetition of gymnastic movement.

Perhaps part of the problem is the lack of a director (none is indicated in the program). Andrew J. Bernhard is credited as the executive producer, but it appears that his role was to assemble acts, not to give this piece the dramatic coherence that might make it more watchable.

If you’re seeking some occasionally entertaining acts in the vein of Cirque du Soleil, you might give this a try. If you want engaging theater, look elsewhere. Grade: C 

— Rick Pender

The Art of Longing

There's at least one thing we long “to do, to feel, to be” in life that we think will make our life extraordinary. Ovation Theatre Company explores these ideas and how they inform our decisions in their first-time Fringe entry, The Art of Longing.

The production, written by eight of the Ovation crew, features four main characters and their individual paths to pursuing their wishes. Two couples, Alivia and Harrison (Devon Campailla and Brandon Burton) and Salisha and Brock (Amy Harpring and Jason Burgess), are young, well-meaning and middle-class. We see their longing transform through the course of the hour-long performance, each in their own individual ways — whether it’s a hunger for independence, leisure time, a better body, purpose, a voice or the ability to fix things — which in turn changes the person each has become.

Alivia, for example, begins the piece with her declaration of wanting to try a new salad dressing (she’s only had Italian all of her life), because, she believes, one’s choice of salad dressing is indicative of the life she leads. The fact that she yearns for (common) bleu cheese is another conversation altogether. But to her, it represents excitement.

Brock’s decision to turn an evangelical church to fulfill his “mission statement” is a little obvious, but Burgess delivers his character’s optimism wholeheartedly. Funnily enough, Brock changes his mission to become a part of a search-and-rescue team.

Salisha, a busy mother of two, finds her goals manifest themselves in a desire to “get dirty” — first in yard work and then in becoming a boozed-up biker chick. And Harrison conquers his battle with body image, but only through stifling his wife Alivia’s individuality.

Also, we see that things wanted sometimes aren’t at all what’s needed, and The Art of Longing is all the better for it. Some of the logistics about this show don’t quite work — like the 1950s-era husband-and-wife banter scene, with TV show music that sounds like something from Leave It to Beaver (I can see canned audience laughter serving its purpose), and at points the plot is repetitive.

Nevertheless, comedy is provided courtesy of the bumbling Burgess and Kyle Nunn, who plays various roles: a snarky community center desk clerk, Southern lawn boy and an egomaniacal bachelor. What does the audience leave longing for? Who knows? A salad, for sure. Grade: B-

— Jessica Canterbury

The War on Weather

Because its premise was so intriguing, the performance of Theatrezine’s The War on Weather was that much more disappointing. The play depicts a world of the near future in which the United States enjoys sunny skies and 75-degree weather every day while the rest of the world gets a full load of nasty and dangerous weather. And, of course, there are terrorists who threaten to bring catastrophic weather systems to the U.S. by stealth and by force.

FEMA reacts with typical overkill, bent on interrogating innocent citizens to cast its weather net wide against potential terrorists. Head of FEMA Ohio, Jeffrey (Justin Keen), and his depressed wife Joni (Nakia White) are ultimately caught in the duplicitous dragnet.

So far, so good. After that the plot line becomes both repetitious and incoherent, when  militant FEMA types goosestep onstage, shouting their lines. The overall style of the performance imitates Saturday Night Live, but with far less writing skill or comedic acting techniques.

According to my notes, the ultimate theme of the play was that terrorists will create the storm that will bring down the unjust government. Although couched in satire, the thinking here still seems dubious, defeatist and gosh darn anti-democratic. Grade: D

— Mark Sterner

Mad

From the first word uttered on stage, it's clear the audience is eavesdropping on a family in pain. Indeed, writer-producer Jen Dalton with her Fringe Festival production Mad seems to want badly to take strangers where they otherwise clearly should never be: inside.

Inside the house, where a family is forced to cope with and quickly understand their son's recent diagnosis of schizophrenia. Inside a marriage, where the once happy couple struggles to stay together in the face of the illness. And inside a mind, tortured and broken, that still manages to show flashes of compassion and love.

Dalton should know. It was, after all, her brother's illness and her family's difficult story on which Mad was based. It's challenging theatre, to be sure — hard to watch and hard to perform. And yet it's necessary. To see and to tell.

As Mad opens, Rob (played with care by Andrew Bernhard) is moving back into his parents' house. His recent strange behavior, including leaving his car running to steal another car and lead police on a three-county chase, has been blamed on mental illness.

The family had a choice: leave him at a hospital or care for him themselves. Deciding, easily, that Rob would be better with them, Mother (Sue Breving) and Father (Scott Fitzgerald) open their house and their arms and hope that prescribed medicine will be the cure.

The problem is, Rob doesn't take to the pills, explaining that they make "the voices go away, and I miss them when they're gone. They’re the only friends I've got."

His behavior, as he bounces between medication and cold reality, becomes erratic and violent, leading the family to wonder whether home is the best place for Rob.

Dalton presents the personal story straightforwardly. This tale needs no devices or embellishment. It's heart-wrenching enough as it is. One exception is the use of actors as the voices in Rob's head, staged by co-directors Ed Cohen and Dan Doerger. The voices taunt, tease and dare Rob, overlapping conversations he's actually having with conversations going on internally. The effect is effectively maddening.

Mad also illustrates how two people can react so differently to the same situation. When Father walks in on Rob, who is playing The Doors far too loud for the late hour, Rob explains that he's going to be a Rock star. Father starts to interject, then sighs, "Never mind." Mother, on the heels of the diagnosis, at first is in denial. Later, she blames herself: "Something must have happened while I was carrying him." It's the only explanation she can muster.

Mad is, in effect, a love letter Dalton wrote not only to her brother but to her parents. It's a touching ode to familial strength and unconditional love. And the result is great theater. Grade: A

— Rodger Pille

Lusthaus (1914)

This is one of those inter-disciplinary performance pieces that find their natural milieu in Fringe Festivals — just as it's exactly the sort of demi-spectacle upon which successful Fringe Festivals thrive. And, bless conceptor-director Gabe Johnson, it delivers a nicely Fringe-y blend of sensory and intellectual exhilaration.

A bare platform in the backroom at InkTank. A handful of well-placed, well-used white lights. An avalanche of sound and music, mostly 19th-century, designed by Heather Brown. Four chairs. Four bodies — two women, two men — appear in (and out of) muslin-white costumes, designed by Hannah Dringenburg to suggest turn-of-the-20th-century under-garments.

Johnson and the four members of the company devised and polished the series of precise movements. Here it's lyrical, sensual, even sleepy. There it's designedly crude, even clumsy. Often there's an edge of threat, even doom.

Is it theater? Not in any expected sense, though there is a script of sorts. Nor is it quite dance. It's more a living, moving gallery exhibit that makes — then artfully breaks — its own rules.

The bodies become fluid sculpture. The words spoken might be descriptive paragraphs pasted to walls beside objects in a museum.

Back in 1986, dancer-choreographer Martha Clarke presented Lusthaus: Vienna in New York, using music, snippets of disconnected dialogue by historian and playwright Charles Mee and semi-dance movement patterns to investigate the spirit of Vienna in 1900 — a time when old disciplines and restraints were crumbling, when of-the-moment sensory experience was all that seemed to anchor or comfort society. New York Times theater critic Frank Rich greeted the piece with enthusiasm. In 2003, Clarke revisited the idea with less success in Washington, D.C.

Now Johnson and company, using similar movement concepts and some of the script from the Clarke event, revisit Vienna at a later date, 1914 — when World War I simmered on the wind and would soon sweep away the last structures and strictures of the old empire. It was a time, Johnson said, "when men were finding voices and roles in a new society" and when "women who had been held down by society were freeing themselves through sexual means."

Whether all that is put on view in a performance of Lusthaus (1914) is not actually important. Plenty is on view. At times the piece is rife with that sort of relishing nostalgia people can have for times and places they can't actually remember. At other times the piece eliminates detail and exhibits pure emotion shorn of context.

Johnson and most of his company are products of the theater program at Northern Kentucky University, where Lusthaus (1914) was created and presented in workshop performances this spring. The company members are Josh Beshears (who also appears in another Fringe 2007 entry, Stephen Hunter’s On Edge), Katie Kershaw, Michael Stone and Jen Spillane (who appeared in her own solo show, Virtue, in the 2006 Cincinnati Fringe). Grade: B+

— Tom McElfresh

Christmas in Bakersfield

Les Kurkendaal's solo performance in Christmas in Bakersfield, which opened the Cincinnati Fringe Festival for me, was at the same time simple and winning. He poses the following loaded question for his audience: What happens when a man brings his male lover home to his family in Bakersfield, Calif., for the holidays?

Oh, but this isn't really the crux of the problem: The family has recently and grudgingly accepted their son Mike's sexual orientation. The real problem begins as Les steps across the threshold of the family's pricey, gated suburban home. Mike "forgot" to tell his family that his lover is an African American (Les, who is telling us the story).

The fun begins in this autobiographical tale as Mike's family tries to hold in their prejudicial reactions to this quite obviously black man. But they are unable to keep from compulsively making racial slurs. At one point, Mike's father Jeff (who talks like a cross between a used car salesman and a vacuum cleaner) asks Les whether he had any work done on his face, because his nose isn't wide enough to be a black nose.

What makes the performance work is that Kurkendaal obviously doesn't have any rancor for the white folks he encounters. He breezes through his social critique and largely allows the audience to come up with the horrified reactions. The way he tells the tale, which he claims is completely true, the entire situation is quite funny and the various family members come to life with well meaning comments that inadvertently expose their limited experience and views.

Kurkendaal's solo orchestration of the tale makes the performance work. We hear from mother and father first, in satirical tones that suggest both outer decorum and inner impulses. Then other family members are allowed to have their say. First there is Jeff Jr., who sounds a lot like Dad. Then comes Linda, a Latina sister-in-law who actually empathizes with Kurkendaal's predicament, having been in the same position some years before.

Eventually we hear from some shocked neighbors, and finally the extended family on Christmas Eve. The dreaded Grandma arrives (every time her name is mentioned an eerie siren goes off, followed by some music that sounds like something from a '50s cop show). Not one to give away an ending, I will refrain from describing the action of the piece further.

While watching the performance, I began to wonder where lover Mike was in all of this family hubbub. I would have liked to see his reaction to his family's crassness. I eventually decided that Kurkendaal probably needed to keep his lover well out of satirical range. In any case, the play was about the reactions of his lover’s family, not about Mike.

Another small suggestion is that the sound effect for Grandma worked so well, why not try this technique a bit more — perhaps a foghorn sound for Jeff Sr.? There were a few obviously bobbled lines that weren't covered, but I assume this problem will smooth itself out as the festival continues.

Christmas in Bakersfield is a performance that explores the borders — the fringes, if you will — of a society still strongly divided across racial lines. It's a report from the front lines, where county-clubbing whites and urban blacks seldom mix, at least not socially.

Although Kurkendaal tosses off his satire of race relations in a congenial and humorous manner, we never quite forget that he is the victim of institutionalized abuse. Grade: B+

— Mark Sterner

Extreme Puppet Theatre

You’re going to think that I don’t like raunchy puppetry, but actually I do. The first time Triumph the Insult Comic Dog appeared on Conan O’Brien, I absolutely fell apart. I’ve never laughed so hard as I did watching Robert Smiegel’s canine counterpart pump a prize-winning poodle at the world-renowned Westminster Dog Show. It was dirty and daring, filled with raucous (or rock us) energy. So rudeness doesn’t turn me off. But laziness does. And that’s the primary fault that dogs Soque du Soleil’s 60-minute presentation of Extreme Puppet Theatre.

There are some promising comic setups — a recurring documentary-style “Great Moments in Puppet History” and a series of episodes that follow the romance between a glove and a sock. As expected, the players offer a barrage of puns, some of which are amusing, especially a Sapphic mispronunciation of Elizabethan England and a list of Jimi “Hand-ricks” songs played at Woodsock. Near misses include a debate among puppet versions of the great Greek philosophers (mediated, of course, by Sockrates), and a French Revolution fronted by the very cakes that Marie Antoinette (shortened for this evening’s purposes to Marionette) urged her malcontented subjects to eat.

But the performances are slipshod, and the opening night delivery felt like an early dress rehearsal where everyone is just half-hearted and joking around. The skits end without warning or resolution, giving the audience no clue or invitation to applaud. There is no program, so none of the performers or writers are identified for praise or blame. That being said, I commend the lone female puppeteer for being more game and stage-worthy than her two male company members, one of whom played a slovenly circus ringmaster with the moniker Ned Bater, whose surname becomes the source of several easily anticipated jokes midway through the show.

Comedy, however blue or bawdy, still requires energy and timing, and passion for your own material is not optional. In fact, for a show that is truly fare for the Fringe, it’s the only currency you have. A company that seems almost bored with its own show cannot expect an audience to be otherwise. Still, I hope that Soque returns next year with an approach that really shows what it means to go on the offensive. But for this year’s entry, Extreme Puppet Theatre is no Triumph. Grade: D

— Nicholas Korn

The Kid in the Dark

What began as a series of writings in response to losing a loved one has been developed by lyricist Mark Halpin, composer Andrew Smithson and director Richard Hess into what might be one of the high points of this year’s Fringe Festival. The Kid in the Dark is performed by a capable cast of five, which includes Justin Scott Brown, Megan Campanile, Beau Landry, Patrick Martin and Sara Shepherd. While none of them is a vocal powerhouse, their talents are evenly matched and their technique is fine enough to convey the many shades of feeling that sift and shift through the 17 songs that make for a very smart 50-minute set.

However, the standout performance of The Kid in the Dark belongs to Halpin’s lyrics. Each song comes from a well-defined point of view and quickly declares both its ironic take on themes of relationships and loss, while never letting go of the emotions that follow. There is an implicit understanding that everyone involved is there to support Halpin’s lines and, as a result, this is a show you listen to intently for what is said and how.

That challenge is present in the opening number, “Worst Case Scenario,” in which the company asks, when faced with catastrophe, “Who will you be?” Although the issues and questions are serious, Halpin and company give us plenty to laugh about. “The Sum of Us” observes how couples often transpose their feelings for each other to their dogs, and “It’s All Going to End’ details in tango how a jilted lover finds consolation in a series of desserts. Also notable are “Not a Gay Anthem,” which proclaims that “though I’m gay, I’m not political,” and “You Could Do Worse,” a lover’s plea that compares favorably to many well-known Broadway standards.

A song that hits a little closer to the nerve is “A Blank Sheet of Paper,” in which an artist tries to re-create the features of the one he loves, praying ‘Lord, let me render them well.” I also liked “If I’d Only Brought You Flowers,” which wonders if we ever can ever do enough to prove how much we love the people in our lives.

Smithson has composed a series of delightful and engaging melodies that move neatly into minor chords when the moment requires reflection or irony. Director Richard Hess deftly uses a stage bare of everything but his cast and three chairs to efficiently define a series of romantic tensions, as well as moments of regret and revelation. He pairs the actors in alternately straight and gay relationships, suggesting that love and loss are universals that remain blind to gender or preference.

Although the greater part of the evening is devoted to song, the words to “Did You Know” are delivered as a rhyming monologue by Patrick Martin. These few spoken moments tell of a father who is able to remember a trove of Hollywood trivia long after Alzheimer’s has stripped away any memory of his son.

The show ends with the title number, “The Kid in the Dark,” a childhood r