CityBeat Fringe Coverage 2008

Review: Catch

Young lives intersect, although maybe the word "collide" is more apropos. The violence and its consequences ripple through a community. Does it take something as scorching as fire to break through the chill of life? Does it take extreme pain to get through to a generation numbed from birth?

Such is Catch, the brand new work from Transit Five Productions out of Michigan. Ambitious? Yes. Challenging? Definitely. Finished? Not yet.

Catch is everything you want from a young company doing a first-time Fringe fest. At least thematically. And with that youthful zeal the performers bring to it you can’t help but be proud to watch theater being created in front of you.

But the whole thing doesn’t quite gel. It’s clear that the collaborative process to get here was more important than the end product. Six students from the University of Michigan ably perform the work, and from the press notes we’re told they very much had their hands in its creation.

You could see how insightful improv skills led to certain scenes and exchanges. The performers are so comfortable with the material and with each other the troupe showcases every bit the skill of any group in the Fringe.

It comes back to the work itself, credited as being written by Seth Moore and co-directed by Moore and Julia Albain. It spends a great deal of time setting up interesting stories and characters, but it never clearly lets the audience in on what’s going on. Perhaps the point wasn’t to create linear storytelling. But given the weighty subject matter and the capable performers, one wishes it were more accessible.

That might be too much to ask of the piece, which clearly has its roots in experimental theater. It blends a little bit of every convention in the book from Greek chorus narration to 21st-century video interaction. There’s even a not-so-subtle commentary about waterboarding thrown in for good measure.

It all serves to illustrate the many stimuli facing Generation Y and how the multitude of voices can overwhelm a mind already on the brink of breakdown.

“You’re in a stall right now, aren’t you,” one character asks another.

“Yes, aren’t you?”

It’s an interesting word choice. A stall, as in an interruption. Can the characters kick-start their lives before the stall becomes permanent?

Some want to. At least want to try. Others, led by the disillusioned Gabriel, are less inclined, thinking the state of the world doesn’t justify the effort. When Britney Spears’ vagina is more important and given more airtime than the real news of the day, Gabriel decides that the world deserve its violence.

The actors are all solid, especially when asked to vacillate between roles and theatrical styles. Special notice goes to Ali Kresch, who brings a confident sense of humor to the odd role of the nurse and then switches to the mysterious and devilish Makayla.

Opening night also revealed some technical issues between the video and audio that need to be worked out. The same can be said of the piece — it’s close, but it needs some streamlining to match the bravery and conviction of its young creators.

— Rodger Pille

Review: then after water

Canadian playwright Jennifer Fawcett’s then after water is an exceedingly difficult piece of material that actor/director Matt Slaybaugh and the members of Available Light Theater (from Columbus) haven’t quite mastered — or illuminated as fully as they must if they’re to make it a satisfying theater experience. That’s disappointing. What the production lacks in vocal precision, clarity and economy of motion are the very strengths that made earlier appearances by Slaybaugh and company so striking — particularly in The Pursuit of Happiness (Fringe ’04) and A/The Post-Modern Love Story (Fringe ’05).

Here’s the plot I got from hints and guesses during the opening performance Thursday. Ben (Slaybaugh) and Ana (Michelle Schroeder) are driving home from a social event. Their 6-month-old son, David, is with his grandparents. They have car trouble and pull to the shoulder on a deserted road. A truck rams their disabled car. The truck’s driver, Eddie (Alex Beekman), jerks Ben out of the car, knocks him out and kidnaps Ana. Ben wakes up in a hospital ward. Ana disappears. Meanwhile and simultaneously, grown son David (Ian Short) appears with wife or girlfriend (Acacia Duncan). They’re stressed over contemplation of the event they're on their way to attend.

Can’t reveal any script secrets beyond this point, not that either play or players answers all questions, including some nagging ones. Why is Ana barefoot throughout? Did Ben wander along a stream and watch moonlight glinting on the water before or after the attack on him? Does the unseen Lisa really have anything to do with anything? What suddenly resolves David’s anger?

Fawcett tells her story in carefully composed fragments that border on poetry, covering 20 years. Conversations start, break off and continue later, sometimes partly repeated. Four or five time frames overlap and interweave — the night of the attack, Ben waking up in hospital, Eddie reliving the attack, Ana wandering through other characters’ recollections, David trying to understand what happened to his parents when all he has to go by is a two-column newspaper clipping.

Characters leap forward and backward in time, stepping into and out of scenes with each other. None of this is bad playwriting. It can be intriguing. The play is, after all, a mystery, a gradual assembly of fragments should keep you guessing.

But sooner or later it has to coalesce, at least to a degree. If enough questions get answered, then satisfaction ensues. A few nagging loose ends just spark conversation over coffee later. If not, not. And in this case, not.

The roaring air conditioning system at New Stage Collective doesn’t aid comprehension, but it also doesn’t account for or excuse imprecise speech on the part of Schroeder, Duncan and Beekman (especially Beekman) nor forgive insufficient volume from Short. The set is three automobile front seats w/ steering wheels on black rolling platforms. Slaybaugh keeps them sliding around like bumper cars at a carnival. There are too many entrances, too many exits and way too many dizzying light changes manipulated by Ryan Osborn.

This script is exactly the kind of illusive, mysterious, poetic material on which Available Light’s stalwarts usually handle with aplomb. This year they seem to have left it Columbus.

— Tom McElfresh

Review: Body Language: A Radical Truth

Critic’s Pick

This production turns out to be an ambitious venture, part sociological tract — not to worry: if the material is heavy, the treatment is light — and part surprising theatrical experience in a space that has its own sense of theater. On opening night there were still a few loose ends, but they should be knitted up as the work continues.

The sizeable audience was divided into three groups and marshaled through various hallway and classroom encounters in the original Woodward High School (aka the current School for the Creative and Performing Arts), where turn-of-the-last-century architecture remains dignified and classical whatever occupies its space.

This work stems from interviews by the nonprofit True Body Project with Cincinnati-area women and teen-age girls, concerning their feelings about their bodies and how those feelings affect their engagement with the world. Badly, it seems, in many cases. But all is not down the drain.

Acceptance of self by the individual and the world, we learn in an odd epilogue involving a young girl, her mother and two garbage cans — separately but temporarily inhabited by the two of them — makes for a rewarding life.

These are hardly new ideas, but the sneaky prevalence of self-disdain, exposed through the True Body Project interviews, suggests they must be continually re-thought. Body Language does so by way of a slightly goofy faux scientist, a grim school teacher who doesn’t want to be in her classroom any more than you want to be there, a stay in detention that's just as bad as you remember it and a trip through Old Woodward High School, a treat in itself.

Project Director Stacey Sims says that learning to live with your own body isn’t just women’s work, that men can benefit from similar self-examination. All I can report is that most men at the performance I attended stayed through to the end.

— Jane Durrell

Review: In Rehearsal

Critic's Pick

Alison Vodnoy, senior at CCM, is one multi-talented young woman. For In Rehearsal she pulls out all her talents — unless she still has magic tricks or opera riffs up her sleeve. Vodnoy wrote this, performs it and uses her dancer’s body to do fabulous things in telling the story.

Coming onstage burdened with clothing, wearing everything she will later use for various characterizations, she proceeds to do something of a strip tease in the abstract. Cap and jacket and shirt and so forth, including a large men’s watch, are distributed on a generous coat rack, and in leotard and tights Vodnoy gets down to business.

She is Akiva, whose love affairs go wrong with regularity and whose sessions with her shrink (which we sit in on) might give him a case history to remember. Or not. If Akiva is a sort of "everywoman," shrinks must hear this every day.

We learn that true love seemed in the offing with The Drunken Director, The Repressed Republican, The Wine Connoisseur, The Married Man, even The Nice Jewish Girl. Vodnoy’s neat twist is that we not only hear Akiva’s side of the story but we also find out what the guys (and the gal) have to say.

With the aid of the props and garments from the coat rack, she takes on each character and rounds out the romantic vignettes we’ve been privy to via Akiva’s telling. These love affairs went off track for predictable reasons but are saved from being commonplace by Vodnoy’s witty take on the matters. I confess to being over-tired of the quest for perfect mate, since what one offers is not perfection in itself. Come on, girl: Nobody’s perfect. Not even your charming character who carries the show.

In common with all these searchers, Akiva wants someone to accept her as she is but doesn’t seem to extend that courtesy to the lover. She is, however, very funny in her search.

I hope this is a work in progress, because its bones are excellent. A little trimming, sharpening, paring down — especially in the appearances of the lovers — will make it a truly polished show.

— Jane Durrell

Review: Mortem Capiendum

Critic's Pick

Walk in the super cool, high tech Media Bridges space in Over-the-Rhine, take a right at the entrance and step back in time to the age of traveling hucksters, miracles tonics and ointments that cure all ills, of Depression-era depression. Two hootin’, hollerin’ pitchmen take the stage (after first dressing it properly, of course) and begin their sales call to the “wise” people of Hamilton County. “Oh boy, a show,” the dopey one announces proudly.

It’s clear there’s one man running the show here: the inimitable Professor Jonathon Saint Miracle. The other guy is just, well, useless. Except when he enlightens the proceedings with an inspired banjo tune. But, oh, there’s also an audience member who simply loves to volunteer. He wouldn’t be financially involved in the proceedings, would he?

Mortem Capiendum nails its atmosphere from the start, which is usually quite a challenge in the Fringe. Many spaces, including the room at Media Bridges, aren’t especially conducive to theater. So give credit to the good folks at Four Humors Theater out of Minneapolis. They take the stage and control focus. Like it or not, while you’re sitting in front of them you’re transported.

The phrase "mortem capiendum" derives from the mysterious trunk with which they share the stage. “To capture death” is all they’ll first tell us about the trunk, their latest creation (and the show’s title). Could their bizarre tale of finding and cheating death scientifically explain the tonic they’ve created that allows all buyers the ability to delay eternal rest?

It’s a good yarn, spun with energy and that certain devil-may-care attitude of confident performers. Here’s our thing, they seem to say. Go along for the ride and it will be a lot more fun.

And it is. Even when the show takes its grave turn. Should one cheat death? Does it come with too steep a price? Watching the whole thing play out, you begin to understand why so few onlookers are reaching for their wallets to buy the elixir when the presentation concludes.

The three-man team from Four Humors is solid and comfortable in the roles and with the material. You wonder if perhaps they didn’t base the characters and cadence on characters from the film O Brother Where Are Thou?, another Depression era trio of con-men.

But the application of those characters in something less sprawling than Homer’s Iliad (O Brother’s conceit), something a little more intimate and metaphysical, sustains Mortem Capiendum and makes it more digestible. And the apparent joy the performers have with fringing makes it extra delicious.

— Rodger Pille

Review: What the Deuce!

Critic’s Pick

A certain tone is set when a production asks of its audience before it's even begun to contribute to the performance. Such is the case with What the Deuce! — a top hat on stage asks for one-liner breakup excuses  — and that resulting tone is anticipation.

Relax. After all, you know going into it (or you do now) that this is a show about relationships, which naturally involves love, sex and laughs. And the interactive element exemplifies the audience’s relationship with the cast.

The performers, Dylan Shelton and Annie Kalahurka, sketch comedians who call themselves Devil’s Deuce, wrote the script, and it shows in their energetic delivery. Over the course of an hour the two try to determine what kind of couple they are — New Age, redneck and mail-order are a few possibilities — with puppets, song and rhyme (yes, there’s a skit called “Female White Rapper”) through six onstage sketches and five how-we-met video segments à la When Harry Met Sally.

What the Deuce! does focus on the nastiness of love: finding out she is a he; when farting is no longer taboo between partners; when your first love, Righty, is no longer able to get physical (arthritis). Yet there is some sweetness, especially in the story of Shelton and Kalahurka as half-baked British skin artists; they were joined by a tattoo.

Certain jokes are a tad too juvenile, and even Shelton, as Prince Charming, asks near the end, “Have I taken this metaphor too far?” — to which he got an honest “Yes.” Some highlights were the New Age couple who talk of their meeting sometime after the peyote wore off in New Mexico and the improv skit “Fill in the Break Up.” Shelton and Kalahurka made (audience provided) explanations like “you’re too ugly” work well for their audience-suggested setting: the Drop-Inn Center, in our case.

Audience participation doesn’t stop at “Fill in the Break Up,” but divulging any more information would take the fun out of it. And that would completely negate the point of this production.

— Jessica Canterbury

Review: Anna the Slut and the (Almost) Chosen One

Critic’s Pick

Hormones rampage through a pair of college boys’ bloodstreams in Andrew Hungerford's new Fringe Festival comedy. Playwright Hungerford, who also has a graduate degree in theater design from the University of Cincinnati, travels back to the myth of a sex goddess for inspiration. The comedy, performed at Mr. Pitiful’s (1323 Main St., Over-the-Rhine), is presented by Hunger Warrior Theatre, a group Hungerford founded at UC in 2004 with fellow grad student Chad Bonaker.

Anna the Slut is the retelling of Ianna’s dangerous adventures in the underworld. She has gone down under seeking the whereabouts of her deceased husband. But her jealous sister Ereshkigal, who rules Hades, has Ianna crucified. She is revived, but the price for the return of breath is that she must send a replacement for herself in this underworld. She decides to send her lover.

(Photo: Jeff Berkle)

The second track for the show has Ianna, showing up in contemporary times, now called Anna. It’s 5,000 years after her creation and there’s a nary a hint of gray hair in her raven Prince Valiant haircut. Anna (Stephanie Brait) still is on the prowl for men she must send to the underworld, where they will eventually expire and have to replaced.

Thoroughly Modern Anna swaggers into a college bar, where she promptly announces that she'll select someone to go home with her. Little does nerdish, shy Greg (Kyle Nunn) and his sort-of-friend and rival Mason (a smooth Jonathan Silver) realize the depths where Anna’s home is located.

Their competition for the sex goddess is interrupted by the bartender (Michael Burnham), who steps out occasionally from behind the bar to read lyric sections from the Sumerian myth. Apparently the bartender has been one of Anna’s beaus centuries before. But he's survived as a kind of referee who brings a certain restraint and justice to Anna’s wholesale campaign to add yet another male to her fold.

Despite Burnham’s weighty, dramatic presence declaiming Ianna’s story, Anna the Slut smacks too much of the impressions that Hungerford’s past English and classical literature classes have had upon him. While the device of accompanying Burnham’s readings with a rather amusing shadow puppet show pantomiming the myth has its charm, it’s too much of a segue from Greg and Mason’s spirited braggadocio in their pursuit of Anna.

The college boys’ rivalries over the hot co-ed are conventional material in ivy-walled college comedies. Yet Hungerford has achieved some engaging characterizations, despite the fact they're drawn from the usual gallery of stock student types. Nunn’s Greg is full of self-doubts and insecurities despite the passion that pushes him toward direct competition with Mason. Greg’s bursts of honesty about his shortcomings are quite winning.

Brait’s Anna is a difficult portrait to pull off. Anna must be sultry, but we must never quite forget the emotional fatigue that lies just below all the sexuality. After all, Anna, like a female version of Marley’s Ghost, has been traveling the world for thousands of years, seducing men to send them to the underworld so she doesn't have to return there herself.

There is a poignant sadness in knowing that this is the goddess of sex who will never experience fulfilling emotional love, and Brait manages glimpses of this spiritual fatigue. She tells the boys during one of their many conflicts, “You must fight over me,” but she says it in a way that suggests she's been through this ritual many times before.

The standout performance, though, comes from Emily Matlack as the wise, pragmatic graduate student Julia. She uses her mezzo-toned voice to bring great authority and considerable wry humor to Julia’s disengaged assessments of personalities and situations. It’s impressive work.

Mr. Pitiful’s is not the most ideal venue for a play. A cornfield would provide better sight lines than what is offered in this Main Street bar, where the stage has only a slight elevation on a deck. Nevertheless, while the dialogue can be a bit wooden before some bright lines reassert themselves, this comedy is a work in progress that surely will be more crisp by the time the company takes the show to Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August.

— Jerry Stein

Review: Undertow

The beauty of the Fringe ethos is that artists have license to experiment, to try things they have imagined but not undertaken. That’s the background of Undertow, a set of songs by Sean Rhiney and Mark Brasington that they characterize as a “visual soundtrack.”

As the pair wrote the music, they shared it with filmmaker Marcelina Robledo, who responded cinematically. For the Fringe, Rhiney and Brasington are joined by two more musicians, Brian Malone and Michael Roszkowski, and singer Tamara Williams — an ensemble that accompanies the soundless, black-and-white film.

Robledo’s work is visually arresting, commencing with images of a fast-flowing river. Then we’re introduced to three friends, two men and a woman, on a camping trip. It’s apparent that the woman (Mary Carmen Barbosa) is involved with one (Nick Rose) but attracted to the other (Joshua Ryan). This triangle is the dramatic dynamic as she's pulled from one man to the other.

As their story is presented, Brasington, Rhiney and company accompany with 11 melodic, bluesy tunes. “Waves” opens the piece, an overture of sorts that sets the mood without words. The rest of Undertow’s numbers feature Brasington or Rhiney as lead vocalists; both play guitar and keyboard; Malone is the percussionist, and Roszkowski handles an array of strings, including guitar and cello.

Their sound is rich and evocative, ranging from the angsty “Trying to Breathe” to a pensive, surreal meditation “Going Under.” When the woman breaks free of her first relationship and goes to her new lover, “Sweet Love” reflects a more innocent emotion, contrasted with the darkly moody “Wading Out” as the rejected lover contemplates his fate back on the river’s edge.

Robledo’s film is well made, with an effective device of a locket that links the relationships and adds a poignant punctuation to the closing moment. But the narrative is overly melodramatic. As the woman decides to leave, we have the cliché of packing a suitcase (hey, she’s just going to another guy’s house), then clutching the locket morosely then leaving it behind with a farewell note. Her rejected lover, piecing together what’s happened, puts down his head and weeps. The emotional sophistication of the music seemed at odds with this overly literal visualization.

But Rhiney, Brasington and Robledo’s project is about experimenting: The live accompaniment adds a resonance to the film that a recorded, synchronized soundtrack would not. As the musicians perform in almost total darkness, sliding almost seamlessly from one song to the next (in fact, discouraging applause in favor of the film’s narrative flow), the audience focuses on the images, which are intentionally hypnotic in several instances, especially “The Dream (Holiday)” and “The Dream (Reprise).”

It’s an intriguing result: The music and the emotions evoked seem to linger while the film’s images fade.

I’m glad Rhiney and Brasington have explored this blended medium, and I hope they continue to collaborate with Robledo. As their mutual efforts become more synchronized and symbiotic, I expect we’ll see performances that are both sophisticated and profoundly evocative. Check out Undertow and imagine the potential.

— Rick Pender

Review: Destination Fringe

Critic's Pick

Psophonia’s performance brings forth much modern dance bang for the buck. Led by co-artistic directors Sophia Torres and Sonia Noriega, this six-strong cast came all the way from Houston, packing a suitcase with eight distinct pieces. Call it a split between the light and quirky, heavy and dark, classic and pretty.

All choreography is provided between Torres and Noriega. In a feat of adaptation, the dancers shift moods from piece to piece as dramatically as our local weather changes from one moment to the next.
They also seem equally at home with both traditional and off-the-wall works, whether they were balanced with legs extended far and wide or completely cocooned in reddish-pink full-body sacks.

Why the sacks? The piece is “Worms,” and sure enough a trio scoot themselves onstage and contort to the peppy sounds of War’s “Low Rider.” (Get it?) Unison moments brought to mind a vermi-exercise class. It’s a cute gimmick, whose duration stretches only to the brink of wearing thin.

“Bent” and “Broken Off,” both choreographed by Torres, bookend the hour-long program. Grace and technique are displayed in clean, full sweeps of limbs, prevalent balances and highly expressive output in the evening’s most intricate choreography.

A kinetic sense of urgency prevails in “Bent” with its drums-and-bass thumps, yet the quartet of dancers remains as lithe and agile as you please. Palms quiver, trace and smack the floor. Body rolls and ripples punctuate the non-stop action. Solos tear away from groups, only to be rejoined by the gang in short order.

I didn’t get a clear sense of the title’s significance — I thought of bent limbs, bent in the sense of being strange. But I felt there must have been a greater intention.

“Broken Off” also explores the individual’s existence within group dynamics. All clad in bright crimson, the five cling to and support one another literally and figuratively as they attempt to avoid precarious circumstances that are physical and emotional. Again, a sense of imminent danger hangs heavy in the atmosphere, tempered by some softness and comfort.

Emotional disturbances shine forth once again when Elizabeth Lucrezio finds herself alone in the “… Devil’s Playground” while she's simply washing her face before a mirror. Bathed in blood-red light, angst digs deep into her being as parts of her body become possessed, beyond her control. Then it was over and she resumed her toilette. Was it just a bad trip?

I was also befuddled by the title choice for the excerpt from Correspondence. Call me too literal, but only the large "god" hands on a video projection communicating in sign language with one another directly appeared to be in correspondence. I failed to see a strong sense of choreographic connection to the title or to the video.

Inspired by Torres’ 2-year-old daughter’s charming malapropisms, the oddly titled “Mazagines & Beat Selts” excerpt explores myriad ways to use — and playfully abuse — a pair of twin mattresses. First Torres alone, then Noriega and Lucrezio do anything and everything you’re not supposed to do with mattresses — except lie on them, as they do at the end. The women become playful as cubs, bouncing, jogging, rippling, rolling and crash-landing in a delightful romp. Oh, and this is set to the strains of Bach strings, an unexpected choice.

The program is rounded out by “Skinned,” an ambitious solo to Tom Waits’ growls, performed admirably by Timothy Johnson, and an excerpt from Phantasia 2007.

Though the company has been around for a decade, the dancers look remarkably young. (But dancers can seem ageless.) I suspect some of their movements might still have room to burgeon even beyond the clear technical skills on display.

Psophonia fills the space with their expansive energy and obvious commitment to movement from one piece into the next, however different each might be. During an earlier interview, Noriega told me, “If you don’t like one piece, just wait for the next one.” I’m glad they packed a mixed bag.

— Julie Mullins