CityBeat Fringe Coverage 2008

Fringe Festival Wrap

The 2008 Cincinnati Fringe Festival is history, after 12 days of theater, dance and music performances. Featuring 37 different shows (every one was reviewed by CityBeat on this blog), the festival offered 170 performance opportunities.

In this fifth year, the Fringe set new records and really felt like it hit its stride. Audience attendance was up 12 percent from 2007, to nearly 6,500 people watching shows; the sale of passes admitting purchasers to multiple shows saw a 44 percent increase this year. Eric Vosmeier, producing director of the Fringe, says, "The 2008 Festival proves that we're still growing."

This year's festival offered the best balance of high-quality shows in Cincinnati Fringe history. I attended three shows on the final evening (June 7) — Mortem Capiendum, Anna the Slut and the (Almost) Chosen One and Oatmeal and a Cigarette — each of which had full houses, and the latter two were standing-room-only by show time. I witnessed about half of the 37 productions (and had to hustle to see that many); I edited all of CityBeat's reviews, which included eight "Critic's Picks." Virtually every production had partisans, and there was considerably commentary from readers on this blog.

The Fringe also awards recognition for favorite shows. Based on a poll of critics the "Critics' Pick of the Fringe Award" was handed to Oatmeal and a Cigarette, a work by Bad Dog! Productions from Ithaca, N.Y. The "Producers' Pick" went to Mortem Capiendum by Four Humors Theatre from Minneapolis. The "Audience Pick" was awarded to Don't Make Me Pull This Show Over: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Parenting, a song cycle with lots of local talent, staged by director Richard Hess (his fourth consecutive year of having a show picked as one of the Festival's best) with Terry LaBolt music directing 18 tunes by the team of Richard Oberacker and Robert Taylor. (The show will be more fully staged at Ensemble Theatre in April 2009.)

It should be noted that the latter category had very close voting: Announcing the winners from the stage at Know Theatre on Saturday evening, Vosmeier noted that Body Language: A Radical Truth, created locally by Stacy Sims and a team of young women, came close to being the audience favorite. The Fringe organizers also announced a special recognition for The Dance: The History of American Minstrelsy by Inthacut, Inc. from Los Angeles.

Two films shown during the "Visual Fringe" were also cited: The "Producer's Flick of the Fringe" was The Job by Flaming Frog of Los Angeles; the "Audience Flick" was The Emulsion by Cider Mill Productions from Cincinnati.

I have just one question: How soon is the next Fringe Festival? (Be patient: It's back in June 2009.)

— Rick Pender

Review: Nearly Nude

There’s a sort of irony that the Sex in the City movie is topping box-office numbers as I compose this review. The gang’s (or some would say clique’s) obsession with finding love and designer labels while always striving to look their best rings true with cultural expectations. A different, more honest take on women’s culture, body images and clothing — or lack thereof — lies in the foreground of Cleveland-based MegLouise Dance’s Nearly Nude.

They might not break new ideological ground, but the topics at hand — that is, some of the fresh and fun ways they’re presented — matter more here. There is a straightforward simplicity about the works that invites the audience into their world of women.

During the majority of the 40-minute collection of five pieces, the performers wear little if any makeup, and their costumes consist primarily of flesh-colored bras and full-cut panties. An exception is “Slips,” where they wear vintage white ones, that once-required female garment whose heyday has passed. Arm-in-arm, side-by-side in a line, the cast of six women shifts awkwardly and stiffly across the stage like mannequins. Their short unison exhales punctuate the silence. Moody music from Philip Glass begins as they separate but remain mostly in formations. Some break rank now and then, reaching outward as they struggle to move forward, then turn back on themselves. In the end, they rejoin the conformity and perhaps safety of the women’s line. Issues concerning self-esteem and self-determination arise.

I expect most women can readily relate to the ritual of “Skinny Jeans,” the show’s opener. For the uninitiated, the title refers to that pair of jeans you can barely squeeze into or hope that one day you’ll be able to fit into again. A half-dozen pairs of discarded jeans litter the stage from the start. Clad in their aforementioned skivvies, the women crouch and crawl like a pack of felines before each skulks cautiously toward her own pair of jeans. Jeans are lifted in worship or disdain before the women tug and jump to fit themselves into them. Scrutiny, then ambitious, animated moves follow. The elation doesn’t last long: cringes, frowns, then it’s “Get these off!” The jeans are thrown into a pile, destined for a place besides the laundry room. I imagined women in the audience nodding their heads at the familiar scenario, but I’d be curious as to what the men think about this one.

Also on the program are “The Clique,” featuring some fashion accessories and follow-the-leader motifs, and “Barbie Girl,” followed by the partly self-explanatory “Stripped” that displays some ballet-referencing choreography.

The wanna-be fun-loving “Barbie Girl” feels a bit predictable and nets out somewhere between mildly comedic and slightly kinky, what with the trio’s attire: short, flippy clear plastic skirts and matching crop tops with pink trim paired with clear Lucite platform mules. (Because this is Nearly Nude, they wear the nude undies beneath.) I can’t decide whether taking this someplace more sinister or just hamming it up more might have increased its effectiveness.

It opens with a young girl playing with (you guessed it) three naked Barbie dolls. She later “plays” with the real live dolls. Their stiff arms bent at the elbows and robotic ticks brought the staple ballet character of Coppelia to mind. Music from London Gay Men’s Chorus and other bubblegum Pop tunes bring a fun, peppy touch. A lyric sample: “I’m a Barbie girl/In a Barbie world/Dressed in plastic/It’s fantastic.” Indeed.

It’s worth mentioning that this production doesn’t focus on technical moves and high-energy dancing. The concepts carry more weight than the dancing itself, which is not always as inspired. But here, the risks often work and feel natural, the way the performers have the guts to put their figures on display in skimpy costumes to show what everyday women, who don’t all have typical dancers’ bodies, look like underneath the artifices of makeup, fashion and pretense. In other words, the six women of MegLouise Dance are keeping it real.

— Julie Mullins

Review: Your Negro Tour Guide

Critic’s Pick

For approximately five years, I worked in close physical proximity to Kathy Y. Wilson at CityBeat, sometimes editing her column, “Your Negro Tour Guide.” Wilson has a distinctive voice — both in person and in print. She’s loud and sassy when you’re within earshot, and she’s thought-provoking, even incendiary, on the page. Her rants in CityBeat between 2000 and 2006 attracted and irritated readers. Many of them were collected in a 2004 book of her essays, NPR commentaries and more.

Now she’s onstage, channeled through actress Torie Wiggins, a CCM drama grad, whose one-woman Fringe show at Media Bridges channels Wilson and more: Wiggins not only captures the joy and sorrow of Wilson’s words, she re-creates some of the personas that Wilson used, like a fast-talking woman demanding a hair-weave-and-nails makeover in 30 minutes or another who explains the mindset behind “talking black to the screen” at movie theaters.

There’s humor, too, in the interspersed sections of “Versus” that provide interludes throughout the 55-minute performance: “You have Seinfeld, we have Rock. … We have James Brown, you have Elvis Presley.” It’s a great device that had Wiggins’ audience nodding and saying, “Mm-hmm.”

But the best parts of Wiggins’ performance happen when she takes on Wilson’s more impassioned material: “Lemme holla at you today,” she begins, delivering the writer’s contemporary take (“A BeBop for MLK”) on the “I Have a Dream” speech — she calls it “I had a dream.” It’s a vision of unity and peace that ends with diverse people joining arms and singing “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.” With that Wiggins raises an eyebrow, fixes a smirk on her audience and finishes, “Then I woke up.”

There are a few Cincinnati references, especially a touching Mother’s Day letter to Angela Leisure, mother of Timothy Thomas, whose shooting by a white police officer pulled the pin on the grenade of local riots in 2001. But many of Wilson’s CityBeat columns had more universal messages: In “O Brotha, Where Art Thou?” Wilson took on black males ages 13-55, saying, “You’re scaring me,” referring to them killing one another. “It’s like a snake eating its tail,” she observed. With increasing emotion and anger, Wiggins presents Wilson’s point: “People died so you could be free to be better. But today you’re killing each other and it can’t get much worse.” Then she brings it home: “Let’s make love. Let’s make it better.”

I suppose that Wiggins and her director Jeff Griffin have assembled a more palatable version of Wilson than you might get from reading her complete body of work. But they have certainly captured her vibrant prose, her strident, self-righteous attitude, and her zeal to say things that others have hesitated to discuss.

That was the power of Wilson’s writing, and it comes to life in Wiggins’ performance. Wilson was at the opening night performance I attended on Thursday; her raucous laughter from the back of the room reminded me how she could disrupt the office and make us think at the same time. But it was the words and thoughts erupting from Wiggins’ performance that reminded me of Wilson’s powerful voice. It was good to hear it again.

— Rick Pender

Review: Southwest Ohio Society of Badasses

Like a small projectile lodged into a skull, the memories of a miserable youth tend to stick with you. You carry the torment around, wishing you could shed it, but also oddly comfortable that it’s there, all the time, reminding you of what you lived through and theoretically made you stronger.

Getting it out, sharing it, has to help. That simply must explain Southwest Ohio Society of Badasses, the Fringe 2008 offering from This Ain’t Real Theatre Company. Written and directed by Miami University theater professor William Doan, Badasses is as much catharsis as performance. It’s a venting: loud, crass and emotional. It needs to be all of that and more to get those deep-seated feelings out in the open.

But while it’s daring and personal, it’s also not the most polished piece of theater (even Fringe theater) available right now. It tries really hard, but you can also see it trying really hard, and that takes away from its effectiveness.

Badasses centers around the early life of Bud (played by Justin Baldwin) and his tumultuous, abusive relationship with his stepfather, a man so strict he would literally lash out at Bud for every rock and stick his lawnmower would hit in the yard. The unseen character — appropriately named Dick — is nothing short of despicable; he’s like a Johnny Cash song character without the cowboy charm. At the brink of adolescence, Bud is so scared of the old man that we’re told he develops blisters in his mouth.

And that’s pretty much the show. We watch Bud grow older, but the hatred stays the same. The relationship and dynamic never really arc. Not to minimize or downplay the seriousness of what we’re examining: abuse, especially by a parental figure, is awful stuff. But as a plot for this particular show, it just never quite goes anywhere.

Not that the creators don’t try to keep it interesting. I actually liked how the show made fun of theatrical devices. It’s pretty self-aware. So much so that there is an actor onstage (Alex Homer) who literally just sits behind a microphone and announces when flashbacks are occurring and who uses reverb to signify a particularly foreboding offstage voice.

Badasses is at its best when it’s loose and funny, when Bud can sit back and tell those great growing-up stories that we all have. His sometimes involve freak BB gun accidents.

At those times, the show lives up to its name. But when it tries too hard to hit home, it comes off too “after school special” — and that’s not badass at all.

— Rodger Pille

Review: Don’t Make Me Pull This Show Over: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Parenting

Critic’s Pick

There is no typical Fringe show. Some are experimental, some are predictable; some are triumphs, some are failures. I heard someone suggest that Richard Oberacker and Robert Taylor’s musical revue Don’t Make Me Pull This Show Over might be too polished for the Fringe. I disagree. To me, the Cincinnati Fringe is about reveling in the many ways theater can work. And this show works.

The show about the joys and sorrows of parenting has A-list credentials. Ace, a 2006 Cincinnati Playhouse hit by Oberacker, a Cincinnati native and CCM grad, and Taylor seems headed for Broadway. This production of their latest work is staged by Richard Hess, CCM drama chair, and it marks the fourth consecutive year that a show he’s directed has been a top Fringe draw. (Previous hits have been Don’t Look Down in 2005, both (UN)Natural Disaster and The Catholic Girl’s Guide to Losing Your Virginity in 2006 and last year’s The Kid in the Dark.) Music direction is by Terry LaBolt, former CCM professor and Broadway conductor.

Each cast member could handle a starring role — Charlie Clark (who also has his own solo show in this year’s Fringe); Jessica Hendy and Gina Valentine (both CCM grads with Broadway experience, and both about to re-start their run of The Great American Trailer Park Musical at Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati); Michael Shawn Starks (whose next gig is Satan in New Stage Collective’s Jerry Springer: The Opera this summer) and Kate Wilford (who’s been a standout at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company and Ensemble Theatre). Such an ensemble offers the promise of great things.

That’s exactly what the oversold audience expected at Wednesday’s opening night performance, and that’s exactly what they got. Standing ovations don’t mean much any more, it seems to me, but the one prompted by this show was perhaps the most spontaneous and heartfelt I’ve seen in a long time.

Whether or not you’re a parent yourself, you have parents of your own and you know people who’ve experienced parenthood. So this show’s 18 songs hit home by running the gamut from birth to not quite death and covering an emotional spectrum from pride to frustration, from relief to grief. The opening ensemble number, “Not Me,” is about the shock of imminent parenthood, and the quick sequel, “I Need Sleep,” re-creates a phenomenon everyone knows. That’s followed by “Because I Said So,” the show’s most hilarious number, marking those outbursts we heard our parents say and vowed we’d never repeat — then find ourselves spouting, afflicted with “parental Tourette’s.” In “I Had a Freakin’ Box,” Clark and Starks compare the simple amusements of their youths with today’s distractions, especially video games.

But Oberacker and Taylor’s songs don’t merely provoke laughter. Some are somber: “Do You Know,” sung by Hendy to a father who’s had a son, or Wilford’s “Against the Glass,” a take on the first days of motherhood. Wilford has the show’s most electrifying song, “This Is Still My Country,” portraying an angry Muslim mother defending her daughter who has been singled out by a public school teacher for not being Christian. Starks sings the show’s most painful number, “God Bless,” a lengthy monologue portraying the anger and guilt felt by a man whose son has been overtaken by instability and homelessness.

But the show keeps its balance, thanks to Hess’s simple staging and the varied, clever material. I especially liked two rueful, amusing numbers — “I Don’t Have the Right,” sung by Hendy, about a mother who finds a stash of dope in her daughter’s underwear drawer but can’t quite condemn behavior she herself played out in her youth, and “What Took You So Long,” in which Valentine is a mother whose gay son finally comes out, offering information she’s known for years.

The show’s tender conclusion offers “Reversal,” with Wilford singing about the emotional challenge of tending to a dying parent and “In the End,” a paean to the potential every parent sees in his or her children.

The return of Don’t Make Me Pull This Show Over has already been announced as the final production of Ensemble Theatre’s 2008-2009 season (April 29-May 17, 2009), and I suspect it will evolve between now and then. It’s a tad long, and the acoustics at Know Theatre (the Fringe venue) aren’t perfect — LaBolt’s accomplished piano playing occasionally overpowered the singers.

I think it needs a new title, too: This one is unwieldy and emphasizes only one dimension of the multi-faceted work. Based on opening night, however, I have no doubt this is one of the hits of the 2008 Fringe; the limited number of performances means tickets will be scarce.

— Rick Pender

Review: Strawberry Pie

Anyone who has partaken of even a modest sampling of Fringe shows must realize that multimedia productions are big with young artists. Three of the six shows I have seen used live-action performance with video and/or film. The individual components of Strawberry Pie are often quite artful. This piece from Cincinnati-based Jamming Talent Productions includes aerial dancing and a dramatic film/stage character portrait detailing the agonies of Joe (Chris Conner), a heroin addict. But problems arise in the failure to integrate these artistic elements so the whole can become greater than the individual artistic parts.

The show opens with a wrenching film from Andrew Bernhard, shot in impoverished areas of Cincinnati, detailing Joe’s aimless, solitary life made insular by the heroin he heats up in a cooker and mainlines. Conner, as Joe, is a pale, frail, slight actor who certainly projects the ravages the drug on the body. This is no gym rat.

Joe gets high and sits numbly on a fire escape, wanders his cavernous empty apartment and prowls streets and alleys. He has become a chemically constructed zombie. Once the film goes into freeze-frame, Conner’s Joe is live onstage. His mind racing, he launches into a monolog “arranged” (supposedly that means written) by Conner. What Joe throws out are reflections of an arduous journey across a barren emotional plain ranging from desperate, even frenzied, contemplations of a failed life to euphoric hazes.

He talks vividly about the bridges of life collapsing before he and his fellow addicts can cross them to the shore of opportunity. “I could have changed the world,” he shouts to the silent air. The lament is classic in addicts. Their vocabulary is filled with could-haves, should-haves and would-haves. Their conditional verbs are commentaries on their lives of inaction.

As Joe’s stupor increases, the performance becomes more physical. Conner shows the definitive symphony of addiction-depression, muscle and bone pain. All this is captured in what could be called the choreography of inner pain. He raises his arms and turns his head away as if deflecting invisible threats. There are contortions of the torso and heaves upon the floor.

But this kitchen-sink reality is basically abandoned with the appearance of aerial dancers (Rebecca Parker, Holly Price and Jeremy Allen Millsaps). The lyrical effect, so disparate from the harshness of Joe’s addiction, suggests an evening of two one-acts even though there actually is no intermission in the 45-minute performance. The aerial dancers show considerable strength, lifting themselves up silken swaths of fabric. They competently wrap their bodies in the fabric in various ways to achieve the support that enables them to hang upside down, spin and strike and hold the grand jeté pose (what the ballet terms a split-like extension of the legs achieved in a mid-air leap).

These dancers are Joe’s guardian angels. Two of the angels, masked and poured into what Millsaps calls liquid latex body suits, initially appear briefly in the first section. They carry Joe in various forms of elevations, perhaps to suggest a protective presence. But in the concluding and quite extended section they seem to be rather uninvolved creatures tending pretty much to their maneuvers with the cloth, like acts in Cirque du Soleil. At one point, Joe sits passively in a womb-like sling formed with the fabric, while these angels contort about him. Finally, Millsaps as the praying angel, descends and sprinkles rose petals on Joe’s corpse.

The aerial dancing is not served well at the Know Theatre, lacking a fly space from which to hang the rigging to give the dancers more elevation. At the Know, the dancers are too close to the floor, robbing their moves of a more thrilling dramatic impact.

Millsaps’ Jamming Talent Productions is an earnest company and reflects sincere commitment to producing works with substance. Millsaps told me that Strawberry Pie was based on the death of a cousin who also was addicted.

Yet the drama and dance portions of this work are disconnected possibly because of the great divide between drug hell and the ethereal acrobatics. Millsaps’ spinning angels do not guide, nor instruct, nor save. They are merely decorative, just as those stony figures that guard the entrance of tombs. Pretty — but irrelevant. This lack of a more defined vision might be a consequence of Millsaps multiple talents. Perhaps another director could have stood objectively outside the production rather than Millsaps, who is so deeply placed within it.

– Jerry Stein

Review: The Dance: The History of American Minstrelsy

In The Dance playwright-actor Jason Christophe White and his actor brother, Aaron White, dig into a difficult, seldom-discussed, hot potato topic — blackface performers and the minstrel shows in which they entertained American audiences for nearly two centuries. Their purpose is twofold and nicely balanced between informing people and entertaining them with a bright, funny show about a form of show business that had its dark corners.

(Photo: John Hutten)

The brothers appear as minstrel clowns in blackface, white gloves, improbable wigs and clothes — all in the manner of traditional “end men” comics, Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo. The show is intricately conceived and staged. They sing, they dance, they tell jokes and strike comic poses — all in the overstated manner of Bones and Tambo — as they move the audience along swiftly through the history lessons:

• Minstrels shows were the first indigenous American form of entertainment.

• From the mid-18th century until the Civil War, minstrel shows featured white men in exaggerated black makeup entertaining white audiences with disparaging stereotypes of blacks as lazy, superstitious buffoons who were musical and always joyously happy.

• Minstrel shows were the conduit through which songwriters could reach American audiences with new songs.

• After 1865 it was illegal in many areas for black artists to entertain white audiences. Black performers often wore blackface to work in vaudeville and revues.

• Professional minstrel shows died out around 1910, but blackface lingered in amateur entertainment and in Hollywood until the middle of the 20th century. The first sound movie, The Jazz Singer (1928), had Al Jolson singing “Mammy” in blackface. Bing Crosby appeared in blackface in Holiday Inn (1942), as did Joan Crawford in a lame 1953 musical called Torch Song.

• Minstrel-like racial stereotyping still goes on in some forms of entertainment to this day.

The Dance is conceived in a stylized manner and, for the most part is executed stylishly. The brothers White believe strongly in their material and work hard at delivering it with punch and passion. Where the show occasionally stumbles it’s because the mechanics of the satire — the exaggerated movement, the loud, aggressive vocal delivery and the stylized posing — get in the way of the meat of the satire.

Technical malfunctions screwed up the last few minutes of the June 1 performance, stealing pace and damping some of the haunting effect of the show’s final, serious moments.

– Tom McElfresh

Review: Giving Up Later

In just his second local show, CCM alum and up-and-coming songwriter Adam Wagner illustrates that while “falling in love” songs are fun, it’s the songs about love lost or missed or needing repair that are the most interesting.

Giving Up Later is a one-act song cycle written by Wagner, arranged by Zachary Dietz and ably performed by a small cast of mostly CCM students. Early publicity materials touted the theme of commitment and how giving oneself to another is essentially giving up future iterations of one’s life, future “laters.” That idea surfaces here and there in the show — sometimes in more pronounced ways than others — but it doesn’t really serve as a through-line. It’s more of a tone or vibe that all the songs have in common and less a literal theme.

(Photo: Kurt Strecker)

In that sense, the show is more demanding and therefore less accessible than Wagner’s previous Fringe entry, 2005’s Don’t Look Down. Written while he was still at CCM, that song cycle had a bubbly effervescence revolving mostly around first love, early love, flirty love. Giving Up Later’s songs mostly don’t have that joy and youthful energy. They tackle weightier issues: dealing with death, growing old with someone and finding the strength to turn the page when a relationship expires. It’s challenging, but in turn the songs are more complex and advanced than his earlier work. In other words, Wagner has grown up as a person and consequently as a songwriter.

Right out of the gate, he and the cast grab the audience with six great tunes. The prologue introduces the cast and its central figure, played by CCM freshman Ryan Breslin. He’s literally the center of the attention onstage and will be the one character carried through from song to song.

With tight harmony, “Walking Against the Wind” showcases the vocal abilities of the cast, and “Falling Forward” displays Wagner’s gifted ability to spin everyday clichés into lyrical treasures. A little funny and a lot sweet, it’s songs like these that manage to be both cute and heartfelt all at the same time. Wagner’s talents are undeniable.

Some old but good material also makes its way into this cycle. “When She Waves First” and “Traci’s Song” were both performed (and were personal favorites) in Don’t Look Down. “Traci’s Song,” particularly, makes for a nice standout moment for Chelsea Barker, who gives just enough to let the audience into the heartbreak but holds enough back to make sure we know her scars are on the inside.

Lori Valentine, former CCMer and local stage veteran, has a similar moment in “No U in Spain,” displaying a wide vocal and emotional range as her character throws herself in an overseas vacation to forget an old flame.

With so many songs spread around, each actor has more than one standout moment. But that also adds up to a slightly bloated run time (about 75 minutes).

The emotional double-punch at the end of the show, “The Angel in the Tow Truck” and “One Bad Choice,” about the central character’s relationship with his father and his need for closure, doesn’t quite land as solidly as you hope. It’s through no fault of the songs or the performances, per se. After almost 20 preceding songs, the show might have taken just a little too long to get to them.

Director Ashton Byrum stages the action as briskly as he can using a very Fringe-y set, dressed with spare tires lying about like at a junk yard or mechanic garage. But there’s a lot of material to plow through. Sometimes the tires were well employed; at others, they just seemed to be used for the sake of it. Regarding the set, patrons should note that the sightlines at New Stage can be difficult. So get there early to claim a good, comfortable chair.

Giving Up Later is a great step forward for a young songwriter. Part of the charm of Fringe Festivals is seeing that next generation of theater stars. Wagner is almost certainly that. One hopes that his next work might better combine the happy, catchy melodies of his first work with the complex, introspective, dramatic tunes heard here. That’s a combination to look forward to. Later.

– Rodger Pille

Review: Car/Street

Car/Street is exactly the kind of performance one would expect to see in a Fringe Festival, even though by now the show has closed (it was a one-night-only run): On blocked off Jackson Street (in front of The Know Theatre) in Over-the-Rhine, a good-sized crowd stood on a sidewalk and watched cars, pedestrians and bikers pass by, re-creating a “living streetscape.” For 25 minutes or so, this was what happened. But then there was more: Audience members begin to interact with each other; neighborhood children joined in, yelling “Hey!” back at the pedestrian cast members; passersby stopped to see what’s going on.

This was local artist Andy Marko’s point in creating this piece: Human dramas exist everywhere — but are better observed in an urban environment — and people need people.

The “car performance art” began with a couple leisurely walking their dog down the street, and then a car, out of sight, repeatedly blowing its horn. “When they honk at me, I flip them off to tell them not to honk,” said the woman next to me to her neighbor, adding something about the “ghetto.” (I’d like to think she was part of the show.) Meanwhile, nine different cars of various manufacturers and status symbols floored it down the block — or cruised, tailed bikers, held up traffic while blaring the radio (which just happens to air an auto insurance commercial), played chicken and tried to park — while a tired-looking man pushed a grocery cart and wiped his brow, and a woman walked by looking for something up in a tree.

It was interesting to see how the performance artists interacted with each other, but even more so was observing the audience’s reaction to this series of events. People get a little uncomfortable when a car stops in the street for no apparent reason. The same applies when a car entered a street going the wrong way and another one was coming in the opposite direction.

Neighborhood kids hung on the parking lot fence, watching the audience watch them. “Do it again! Yay!” they yelled, before they’re summoned inside for bed. In between “scenes,” attendees, who were almost stretched down the whole block, looked right and left, exchanging looks with one another in anticipation. As strange as it sounds, it was exciting to stand on this street and watch these cars.

– Jessica Canterbury

Review: UnMasked: Curt … from Detox

Critic’s Pick

Curtis Shepard is an ingenious actor. He’s to be remembered from performances with Children’s Theater, at the Arts Consortium, at the Museum Center and on other Cincinnati stages. But as he demonstrates in UnMasked, he is also an ingenious and energizing writer. He has that rare playwright’s knack for imagining a character, then arranging a spare dozen or two words that, when spoken, will ignite into a portrait. Not a caricature, mind you. Not a sketch or a type. A multi-dimensional character.

When actor Shepard takes over from writer Shepard, he adds a gesture or two, a signature tone of voice, a characterizing mannerism, and in nanoseconds there stands an individual zinging with energy, ready and able to lay some ideas on you and just as able to ask and deserve your attention.

Shepard says that everyone in the world possesses a very precious thing: his or her story. And they have two serious responsibilities: To live their stories and to tell their stories. A dozen or more times during his 60-minute unmasking he turns his back briefly and steps around a plastic lawn chair that in the only thing on the platform with him. When he turns back, somebody different is standing there, already plunging into the middle of his story. No preambles or reasons why. No scene-setting or excess exposition. You don’t hear many names or dates or much about background. Suddenly you’re up close and personal with someone you’ve never met, someone who immediately begins unmasking.

There’s a rapping hipster, but his rap is not stagy; it’s a natural manner of expression with him. Rhymed, rhythmic lines swim organically inside longer, unrhymed speeches. There’s a brain-damaged child with a talent for friendship — and for irritation. And there’s a wonderstruck dude who wakes up in a long white hallway with no doors and a floor of shining solid gold — shiny like, he tells us, a friend’s gold tooth when it was new. Sincere comedy and deep stress play equal parts in is his unmasking as he sorts out where he is.

Interviewed before the Fringe, Shepard said that the audience’s takeaway from his show should be that, “Everybody wears a mask; it’s important that we take them off and discover that we’re all the same and we all want to be loved and accepted and respected.”

In his 60-minute show Shepard unmasks eight distinct individuals, some rather fully, some less so — like an astonishing “little person” with the prominent breasts and the equally prominent mustache. Then, in a sudden finale that’s both startling and moving, he helps you realize that all along he’s been removing layers of masks from himself and, at the end, there stands Curtis, ready to be respected.

— Tom McElfresh

Review: The Attack of the Big Angry Booty

The use of comedy in treating difficult subjects in theater can be an effective tool for connecting with audiences that might resist such topics as entertainment. Recent plays on the subject of cancer such as Margaret Edson’s Wit and Tania L. Katan’s play about breast cancer, Stages, adroitly use laughter to make such topics more inviting. Plays such as these entertain while they inform. Les Kurkendaal’s 2008 one-man Fringe show, The Attack of the Big Angry Booty, applies humor to the anxieties and health problems stemming from being overweight.

The Los-Angeles based performer is a writer, storyteller and comedian. But to keep bone and sinew together, he tells the audience at Below Zero Lounge that he has had to take a lot of jobs outside show biz. One has been working for Jenny Craig, the weight loss program. His 60-minute show interweaves some of the weight struggles of Craig clients in addition to autobiographical detailing of his own anxious relationship with the scale as he tried to lose 20 pounds.

Kurkendaal, who looks splendid now that his Taco Bell excursions are under control, introduces a gallery of characters in his storytelling style. Sue, who wants to lose weight to improve her sex life; Jill is puzzled as to why her “salad” diet fails to improve results when she climbs onto the scale. Kurkendaal solves that mystery with some hilarity. A competitive mother and daughter try to lose weight together. But their conflicts connote deeper psychological hostilities with each other.

Meanwhile, Kurkendaal explores his own weight struggles that include the temptations of overeating while performing on the road, the trance-like loss of willpower at Taco Bell and self-deprecating remarks about his physical appearance. His self-commentary includes paranoia about something that seems to be following him when he looks into a mirror nude. Just what his stalker happens to be is a funny revelation.

Basically, Kurkendaal’s mix of the personal with the Craig vignettes is a workable idea. The problems that keep his show from achieving its potential go to structure not material. The better forms of storytelling have what the theater calls an “arc,” that is, a structure that moves from exposition to some sort of crescendo to resolution (or at least insight or perspective).

Kurkendaal’s weight loss account is a journey. At the outset, he profiles overeaters and finally identifies the type of eater he is. But unfolding his experience eventually proves redundant. He keeps getting off and on a chair that serves as a scale. Its readings cause a repetition of frustration/accomplishment/frustration and so on. If the ups and downs of the scale do reflect the essence of his weight battles, then he needs to edit the material. We get it after three or four weigh-ins.

The greater disappointment in the show is the client stories. Some of the people Kurkendaal re-creates, using different voices and mannerisms, really are quite interesting portraits, such as a woman who comes to Jenny Craig who is not overweight.

The show would be more involving if some of these client stories were more developed. As it stands, he really does little more than cataloguing. When a character is introduced, interest is barely established before we return to Kurkendaal’s scale for more ponderings on his poundage. This show about being overweight is anorexic when it comes to substance.

— Jerry Stein

Review: Inner:City

The Fringe-iest walking tour you’re ever likely to put shoe to pavement with comes by way of Inner:City Tours and is called just that: Inner:City. When I took it on Sunday, street life was languid in the afternoon sun, but the stories that came through my ear buds were plenty lively. Bring your own iPod to download this podcast-guided tour or if, like me, you’re not up to speed in the technological department, borrow one of the limited-supply of loaners. Inner:City will be offered only one more day, June 7, at 1, 1:30, 2 and 2:30 p.m., leaving from Know Theatre Underground.

The mix of history and fun and What’s Up Now makes for a few surprises along the way. Allow an hour-and-a-half to two hours, with some sit-down time at the Coffee Emporium, to take a look at an area where history and fun and new stuff are all mixed up anyway.

The taped Voice talking directly to the iPod listener purports to tell you things she might not tell her best friend — a story about her grandmother, her great-grandmother and the Germania building that, if true, would suggest the cheerful, young-sounding, slightly flirty voice belongs to someone pushing 60, if you do the math. Don’t do the math; you’re here to have fun.

Some of the material shades into urban legend. The deep basement of a one-time theater on Vine Street leads to talk of underground apartments and passages the Voice hasn’t actually seen herself but hears rumors about. There are other embellishments: the iPod listener is told about the Voice’s boss, who just doesn’t get it, and the listener might play a part in a little street theater. There are repeated admonitions from the Voice to be careful and a pretended scuttling of a section of the tour “for safety issues.” This is, I suppose, meant to add excitement to the venture, but seems to me irresponsible. Some people might use the Fringe to explore a neighborhood they are slightly afraid of anyway. This kind of talk only underlines their concerns.

It’s pretty interesting in Over-the-Rhine without tarting things up. Something not mentioned by the Voice was a piece of careful graffiti, high on a building on 13th Street, a message painted as though on a television screen, “Every moment we’re creating our future.” Yep. Something to think about when surrounded by the past and listening to an iPod, as in Inner:City.

— Jane Durrell

Review: Oatmeal and a Cigarette

Critic’s Pick

The set for Oatmeal and a Cigarette incorporates more afghans than you could shake a knitting needle at, and pretty soon we know why. Doting big brother Claire, who has been raising Billy for 27 years and answers to “Mommie,” knits in the evenings. Knits enough security blankets for a regiment.

The premise here — Billy is 30 but thinks he’s 3 — is open to plenty of cheap laughs but the script and the cast sidestep temptation. As Billy, Daniel J. Kiely uses his considerable bulk to terrific effect; dread locks and beard only setting off his open face where expressions as pure as primary colors come and go. Claire (Karl Gregory) and Babysitter Jane (Madeline Maher) are in what is at first an unspoken rivalry for Billy’s trust. The competition quickly becomes not only verbal but also loud. Both need Billy to complete their visions of themselves. Claire’s seeing himself as Mommie might stem from a mother who decamped; Babysitter (and graduate student) Jane needs him for the practical purpose of her thesis. Billy is her subject, publication her object, and removal of Billy from what she sees as an unhealthy environment a collateral issue.

Sex is the wild card, of course. Billy’s sexuality. Even for someone who thinks he’s 3, those post-puberty urges come along. Babysitter Jane faces more than she bargained for.

This play, sharp and together and headed inexorably down its road, reached finished form through group action by Bad Dog! Productions of Ithaca, N.Y. The three actors, playwright and director George Sapio (founder of Bad Dog!) and Melissa Thompson, stage manager and Sapio’s co-director, took the idea of Billy and played with it through “improvisation, character games, acting exercises, until the characters and story started to show,” Sapio says. Then he began to write, with continual input from his collaborators.

This is ensemble work ticking along at high speed, with results that are extremely funny and surprisingly moving. All three cast members inhabit their parts as though they lived them, and the pace of the show is just right. Throw in a great imitation of a lawn mower and a tooth-brushing scene that touches the heart, and you have Oatmeal and a Cigarette.

A minor quibble: Karl Gregory looks way too young to be Daniel J. Kiely’s older brother and must have taken over supplying his oatmeal at the age of 2. But that’s not vital. Suspension of disbelief is what theater is all about.

— Jane Durrell

Review: Next to Not

Because Earth is now considered by scientists to be in a “severe sixth period” of extinction, and Terry Glavin writes that we lose one species every 10 minutes and one language every two weeks, CCM grad Julianna Bloodgood and CEA Hall of Famer Michael Burnham address the issue together in next to not, their theatrical collage devoted to extinction. It’s an hour and 15 minute production — with choreography and live music — that explores loss, our world and how to exist within the two. You’d be right if you thought it sounds like a heavy endeavor.

With material culled from anthropologists, political activists, newspapers and Bloodgood and Burnham’s own poetry journals, next to not opens with facts about Earth currently undergoing the greatest period of mass extinction in human history. The two note that the only difference between this sixth extinction and the five previous cataclysms that have wiped species from world history is that this one involves humans. And, Burnham adds, “We’re not getting smarter with each generation — we’re losing knowledge.”

This analysis of loss touches on several angles — animal and plant species as well as personal relationships — and looks at both causes and consequences, from everything like cancer-causing biochemicals and paper bleaching to the only slightly more publicized gas corporations. At the heart of the production is the section on Harry Harlow’s isolation experiments with monkeys; some he kept in boxes for one year. At several times the dialogue comes back to Ah Meng, an orangutan in the Singapore zoo with whom you can pay to have tea for $95.

It’s easy to get caught up in the complexities of each segment’s subject. Thankfully, the monologues and poems are cut with songs and comedy. Burnham offers an audience member a paper with his phone number on it that also contains Bloodgood’s next lines, should someone have to help her out, just a few minutes before he cautions, “And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack/And you may find yourself in another part of the world,” and breaks out into Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.”

Then there’s the unforgettable sequence near the conclusion of the performance when Bloodgood, in half of a monkey suit, starts in with “I Wan’Na Be Like You (The Monkey Song)” (from Disney’s The Jungle Book), and is suddenly accompanied by a seven-piece band that storms the venue (The Coffee Emporium on Central Parkway), circles the audience a few times and hijacks the clarinetist who has been underscoring Bloodgood and Burnham’s words — but not before showering the crowd with promotional confetti (catch the Queen City Zapatistas on Friday at The Comet).

Because it is so thought provoking, next to not might have had more impact if it had focused on fewer aspects of extinction. But Bloodgood and Burnham’s performances are heartfelt, and the Fringe is all the better for including this piece. They call on us to listen — to ourselves, each other and the Earth. Rather than talk about nature, talk to it, they urge. I leave enlightened and overwhelmed — and wondering whether it’s coincidence that I caught this production the same day I learned about the barefoot living movement.

— Jessica Canterbury

Review: The Next Stage (Ensemble Theatre intern company)

For several years Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati has used the Fringe as an opportunity to showcase its acting interns, aspiring young professionals who work mostly backstage during the season in support capacities. A few of them make it onstage, especially during the holiday show, and most get the chance to understudy roles in ETC’s season. But audiences don’t see much of them. So during the Fringe, they come forward and show their stuff. It’s not really a Fringe show. It’s really just a themeless collection of monologs, scenes and songs. (In some years there’s at least a production number to open and close the performance, but that’s not the case for 2008.)

Nevertheless, this year’s showcase, The Next Stage, is a good chance to see 10 young actors — four men and six women — demonstrate what they’re capable of doing. Most of the performers were onstage at least twice during the 90-minute performance. (By the time you read this, it’s probably over: I saw the second of three performances in this showcase’s brief run; the final presentation was on June 1 at 2 p.m.) Everyone had a chance to shine.

Caitlyn Rose Allison started with a lengthy monolog from Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles; it’s a speech about a woman making a speech for which she hasn’t prepared. Allison did a nice job of conveying a complex, accomplished character who has feelings of inadequacy. Later, Allison re-appeared, this time as the strong-willed Paulina from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.

Jen Walker sang “There’s Been a Change in Me” from the musical Beauty and the Beast. Playing a character who might be Belle’s paranoid doppelganger, she returned for a two-person scene drawn from Jessica Anderson’s How to Keep Your Legs Closed but Your Mind Open, and a brief speech from Edward Albee’s Fragments.

Claire Aberasturi showed considerable breadth playing the withdrawn poet Emily Dickinson from William Luce’s The Belle of Amherst, then returning to sing the brassy “Everybody’s Girl” from Kander and Ebb’s Steel Pier. Similarly, Steve Buckingham offered a dramatic scene from John Osborn’s Look Back in Anger, then sang Jackson Browne’s sweet “Looking Into You.” Buckingham was also part of an extended scene from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing near the end of the program.

Andrew Coil showed a mastery of contemporary material, playing an egocentric character who’s “totally high on fear” from Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth, then turned to a classic role, playing another self-centered character, Benedick in the Much Ado excerpt.

Nicoletta Mazzocca had several chances to show what she could do, starting with the vulnerable woman who posed for a painter years earlier in Donald Margulies’ Sight Unseen. She came back as Iago from Othello, a nice challenge for a female to undertake, and she captured his devious, manipulative character; later she breezed through Much Ado as the sharp-tongued Beatrice. She also played a straight-talking pragmatist opposite Walker in the How to Keep Your Legs Closed excerpt.

Amy King picked less familiar but diverse excerpts, drawing two items from people with strong ETC ties. She performed a self-revelatory scene about a woman who’s child has been murdered from A Package Deal, a script by Lynn Meyers, ETC’s artistic director. She closed the evening with “Something in the Wind,” an optimistically lyrical song by David Kisor, who is the regular composer for ETC’s holiday shows. She also showed fine singing talent with the 1940s-styled “You Can Always Count on Me” from City of Angels.

Dan Tracy used a locally written piece, too — his own monolog about a kid who swipes some Oreos and how his father forgives him; it showed genuine emotion. The balance of his work for the evening drew on Shakespeare: a speech by Claudio from Measure for Measure and one of the characters in the Much Ado excerpt.

Samantha Cistulli proved that she could swing from the drama of Hamlet (her speech was one by the title character) to a sweetly cynical tune by Tom Waits, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” She also partnered with John Stiens for the evening’s funniest scene, an excerpt from Christopher Durang’s Beyond Therapy, about an awkward pair on a first date — both of whom bring some disturbing psychoses to the table. Stiens stepped away from that hysterical encounter to a brief, serious speech from Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. He rounded out the Much Ado ensemble, too.

As I said, it was a very diverse evening. Several of these young performers will remain in town: Cistulli will perform with Cincinnati Shakespeare Company this summer in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s worth noting that CSC’s current artistic director, Brian Isaac Phillips, was an ETC intern a decade ago, and that one of his predecessors, Jasson Minadakis, interned with ETC in 1993-1994. Who knows which of this year’s crop will be entertaining us this season or in the future?

– Rick Pender

Review: The Charlie Clark Show

Critic’s Pick

Sometimes the simplest things are the funniest. And sometimes when things go wrong they become even funnier — particularly with a performer who can think on his feet. That’s what happened on Saturday evening with local actor Charlie Clark’s amusing one-man show about the trials and tribulations of creating a one-man show. We meet him in a simple apartment (the set is pure Fringe with wobbly walls, mismatched stray furniture and items that look like props from a high school production — perhaps appropriate since The Charlie Clark Show is presented in the Black Box theater at SCPA), where he’s frustrated by a looming deadline and nothing written — or even a concept developed — for the show he’s proposed for the 2008 Fringe.

(Photo: Mikki Schaffner)

The narrative is simple. His wife calls; she’s been away for the weekend with the kids to give him time to work. He channel surfs. He rings up for a pizza. He calls Brian Isaac Phillips from Cincinnati Shakespeare for inspiration and a phone number for Giles Davies, a CSC actor who’s mastered the art of one-man shows. But he’s not getting anywhere and the Fringe is less than two weeks away. So he decides to take a shower. That’s when things really spiral out of control.

Along the way, he tries and discards — in the most self-referential ways possible — ideas such as having phone conversations (we hear Clark’s voice as his wife and as Phillips, speaking in silly rhymed couplets) and singing a song about writing a show (“What Am I Doing? I Don’t Know”). He videotapes an imaginary conversation with Frankie, a kind of alter ego, and even has a fight with his invisible adversary.

Clark plays every role, using some quick-change artistry and clever staging to pop in and out as a burglar and a pizza delivery guy. All this is humorously done with a good deal of wink-wink to the audience. But on Saturday evening, reality impinged on Clarks’ show when its out-of-control spiraled a bit beyond what he had in mind. In the final moments, some pre-recorded sound failed as Clark was interrogated about a possible crime involving a baseball bat, the delivery guy and a pizza, with or without mushrooms. Clark tried to play along, then gave up (nervously telling the audience, “This all worked on Thursday!”); he had a brief conversation with his stage manager. They tried again, but no luck. So Clark suggested that the stage manager and another crew member read the “good cop/bad cop” lines — pumped his fist, “This is THEATER!” — and carried on.

I wondered if this was planned, but Clark was clearly flummoxed. Nonetheless, it made his epilogue, another very self-aware speech, this time about the line between theater and reality, especially meaningful and hysterically funny. “Always question reality,” he said. “It might not be what you think it is.” Amen to that.

Even without this ad-libbed interpolation, Clark’s show was entertaining. This was a great reminder about why live theater is immediate, spontaneous and worth seeing — and especially good evidence that Charlie Clark is a performer to watch.

– Rick Pender

Review: Eastbound Jungle

Critic’s Pick

Upstairs at Below Zero Lounge, genuine theater crackles across the stage when the hoboes of Eastbound Jungle settle in. This premier production of a play by recent NKU graduate Brad Cupples is presented as a reading and demonstrates how compelling a tightly written story can be when read by able actors.

The hobo community Cupples has imagined could be a microcosm of any tight-knit group fractured by a tragic event. The play explores “freedom, guilt, and justice,” Cupples says, but that’s not all. Loyalty is another element, so is indecision, and when the character Cleaves talks of justice, it sounds like the flip side of revenge.

(Photo: Jeff Berkle)

Justin Adams is dead-on as Scratch, the observer of the accident that took a life and left the community broken. Wracked by regret, Scratch is goaded by a sly and devious Katie Kershaw as Cleaves, even as Ratchet Jack (Cupples, sitting in for an ailing actor in the performance I saw) tries to keep the group from total breakdown. Warren Bryson gives a cheerful amorality to Caleb, who misses the train out of town because it’s on time for a change, an oversight with fatal consequences. Cupples, playing Ratchet out of necessity, is perhaps a better writer than actor. The other characterizations had more bite.

Set in the present, according to the program, the play takes on a timeless quality by summoning up a society associated with the Depression years. Do people even call themselves hoboes now? The “jungle” of the title is hobo-talk for camp. The trains they all manage to miss are going east. On the back side of the program is “The Hobo Code,” as set in 1894 when the Annual Convention Congress of the Hoboes of America met — not, in fact, in a hobo jungle but in a Chicago hotel. These rules for living are perhaps more rigorous and admirable than those practiced today in corporate and governmental worlds.

Hobos, lacking closets, go in for the layered look, a nuance neatly caught by costume designer Amy Rawe. The spare set, designed by Michael W. Hatton, who also directed, is properly suggestive of a ragtag environment.

Halfway between a radio play and a conventional stage presentation, a reading — like both those forms — can catch you in like crazy when done well. If Eastbound Jungle gives us high tragedy among low life, it also helps us realize that none of us are all that distant, or different, from each other.

– Jane Durrell

Review: The Factory

Critic’s Pick

The lights at the Contemporary Arts Center shone brightly Wednesday night, but the mood was dark in The Factory, a multimedia work that revisits the continuing struggle for women’s rights. Kim Popa and Lindsey Jones, who co-wrote, directed and choreographed The Factory for their dance company from Fort Thomas, spread their work over three performance areas in the downtown museum.

While the mistreatment of women was given significant focus by John Stuart Mills in his 1869 essay, “The Subjection of Women,” it is lamentable that a work like “The Factory” still remains highly relevant today, despite the work of the Betty Friedans, Gloria Steinems and Michael Kemmels. We only have to look at the sexism permeating the 2008 presidential campaign if we doubt why The Factory conjures up substantial vitality.

The performance has the audience start in the CAC’s below-street-level black box theater, beginning with an academic lecture on evolution and its components — anatomy, psychology, pedigree, behavior and chemistry. While an actor at a lectern pontificates on these components of evolution, a quintet of dancers demonstrates his points with herky-jerky, automaton-like movements that include stiff-leg walks, bobbing of heads and angular arm positions. At the end, the dancers, on all fours, lap dog-like at bowls of a liquid that is supposed to be a mysterious “secret ingredient.” Their intake of the liquid results in the manifestation of empty smiles on their faces.

Outside, in the theater lobby, a mini-operetta ensues involving the Factory’s CEO Mr. Washington (the excellent actor-director Mark Hardy) and his assistant Betty (Samantha Wright), dressed in a French maid’s abbreviated uniform and heels, elevating her high enough to require an oxygen mask. Their routine satirically establishes how Betty is more valuable as a sexual object than as a leader of the company in charge of exploiting women and robbing them of their identity.

The audience (numbering about 75 for Wednesday’s first performance) is moved efficiently upstairs via the CAC’s freight elevator to the street lobby, which becomes the ad department. Two performers, skimpily dressed in lacy bras, panties and hose with garters right out of a Victoria’s Secret catalog, hold a clothesline from which hang glamour photos. We understand that The Factory produces glamorous but soulless women.

A telling duet ensues. (The dancers are not identified in this cast of 30-plus.) The male and female dancer move about the lobby holding Plexiglas panels that symbolize the glass ceiling in a woman’s workplace. The woman eventually ends up prone on the floor, encased by the panels, like an urban Snow White in a casket restricting her opportunities.

(Photo: Steve Depenning)

Another chilling section is one in which instructor Betty indoctrinates five little girls who move stoically to the sound of a ticking metronome. They respond to Betty’s bidding with a little inattention, but no rebellion.

Back in the black box theater, a training film is shown. A narrator with a vacuous smile tells women employees of The Factory the dos and don’ts of behavior when one of them is sexually harassed. With a malevolent charm, the narrator suggests they submit to their predator bosses if they want to get ahead in this company.

The final dance brings a chorus of women on stage. In fragmentary speeches, they show confusion and conflict as they seek self-identity. Although this scene is meant to suggest women struggling to summon power for direction in their lives, the writing here is without sharpness and mostly too oblique to make the point effectively.

— Jerry Stein

Review: fricative

Critic’s Pick

According to my dictionary, a “fricative” is a consonant, such as “f” or “s” in English, produced by the forcing of breath through a constricted passage. Performance Gallery’s contribution to Fringe 2008 is a show with this word as its title, and “sound poetry” as its content. What you’ll see in the Black Box theater at SCPA is eight performers, four men and four women, in most black formal attire — as if about to perform a musical recital. They are sober-faced and stand neatly arranged behind music stands. But what you’ll hear is neither formal nor sober: It’s a riot of nonsense syllables, sort of a May Festival on drugs or poetic scat.

The performers’ delivery is serious, well enunciated and impeccably rendered. The four selections offered make no linguistic sense, although what we hear are the building blocks of words. They sound as if they might be drawn from another language. “Kwee-ay?” they ask at various intervals. Is that “qui est?” in French, perhaps, “what is …?”

(Photo: Mikki Schaffner)

The first piece is actually a composition created by Kurt Schwitters in the 1920s, “The Ur Sonata,” a collection of “primitive sounds.” Following principles of Dadaism, an anti-art movement, the Performance Gallery cast has de-constructed the work and re-assembled it according to their own designs. They hum; they chant. The ensemble’s delivery is rhythmic at times, harmonic at others. Sometimes there are sequential utterances. At other times they spit out solo lines in rapid-fire. Sometimes there are bursts of complete cacophony. Much of this feels as if there must be meaning just below the surface — “Flush kala ballabash zack hitti zapp!” — especially because the speakers interpret the sounds with varied expression and emotion. (Director Brian Andrews-Griffin performed another version of “Ur Sonata” with Aretta Baumgartner and Michael G. Bath during the very first Cincinnati Fringe in 2004; all three are part of the current ensemble.)

They offer another piece which doesn’t even use syllables, but mouth noises — clicking, smacking, swishing, sucking, kissing (even — amusingly — a fit of coughing). One selection splits the group in half and pits them competitively against one another with Andrews-Griffin conducting. To conclude, “The Calming End of it All,” has the group lying on their backs on the floor, heads together, bodies forming spokes. They breathe, giggle, murmur and sigh in various patterns leading to a finale.

The selections are performed with artistry and passion by Andrews-Griffin and seven others — Bath and Baumgartner plus Jodie Linver, Regina Pugh, Willemien Patterson, Nathan Singer and Derek Snow — several of whom are accomplished local professional actors. The 45-minute performance is remarkably different than anything else you will see during Fringe 2008.

— Rick Pender

Review: Letters at Large

Letters at Large is about as affable and low-key an entertainment as you’re likely to attend, especially in the middle of a Fringe Festival where intensity and portent are more the order of the day. Likewise, the show’s creator, Canadian Jeff Sinclair, is as amiable and cordial a performer as you could hope to encounter. His 60-minute illustrated lecture is hardly theater. It’s more like sitting down for coffee with an agreeable acquaintance while you see a few slides and hear some amusing anecdotes arising from his wacko hobby.

Sinclair writes letters. Lots of letters. And he’s has been doing it for a decade. Specifically, he writes tongue-in-cheek comments, complaints and requests for unusual services to corporations around the world. The content is typically outrageous, but he writes with such impeccable grammar and syntax and states his case with such seeming sincerity that it would be difficult for a company to dismiss his letters as either ravings or ribbings. While his names and return addresses are all pseudonymous, they too sound legitimate. His purpose. Pulling legs. Provoking a response. Developing fodder for his traveling show.

• He wrote to a bunch of big-city transit companies swearing that he had encountered Brad Pitt panhandling coins on one of their buses.

• He wrote to a cigarette maker describing how, when no one else was looking, the fire at the end of the cigarette glowed green instead of red. If anyone glanced at him, the fire turned back to red. His purpose in writing was to wonder if the green fire was magic and could (like Leprechauns) appear and disappear. Or if perhaps the cigarettes might contain marijuana.

• He wrote to a nuclear power plant in Eastern Europe requesting permission to visit the core reactor at the plant because he thought exposure to the intense radiation might grant him super powers — which he promised only ever to use for the good of mankind.

Occasionally Sinclair snags free stuff — often strange free stuff. A request to a brewery for help with a drinking contest brought him a blowup beer bottle and a pair of socks. He’s learned that while food companies respond to compliments with coupons, they usually respond to complaints with significantly more coupons.

He’s written more than 800 such letters and received some sort of response from more over 40 percent of the recipients. Many of the responses are form letters of the “Thanks for writing. We take all correspondence seriously, and we’ll consider your suggestions” sort. Maybe 25 percent of his targets responded with specific replies. These replies are the red meat of his show. Mostly they’re droll, sometimes intentionally.

He asked a Las Vegas hotel about setting up a camp stove in his suite so a friend could prepare their meals personally. The hotel, Sinclair thinks, saw through his letter. They replied, equally tongue-in-cheek, citing Nevada fire laws as the only reason they had to turn down a request they otherwise would have been happy to honor.

He maintains that if you’re seeking revenge on some company, writing an outrageous letter will cost you a sheet or paper, an envelope and first-class postage. Replying to your letter could cost the company a few thousand dollars in staff time and fees for legal counsel.

One group of Sinclair’s letters secured endearing replies and might make you think there are a few hearts beating inside corporate America. He wrote to a number of mattress companies to tell them he had acquired a new mattress for his 8-year-old son. The boy loved it and found it most comfortable, but he was concerned about a monster that seemed to lurk underneath. Each company accepted the letter as a request for advice from a loving father and replied with witty assurances about how their mattresses were monster-proof.

No, it’s not theater. Hence, where better to find it than at a Festival out on the Fringe? You can see a selection of Sinclair’s letters — ones not in the show — at www.lettersatlarge.com.

— Tom McElfresh