The Dénouement

What a long Fringe trip it's been.

by K. Ross Hoffman

above under inbetween

This year in particular, it felt like a frolic. "It seems like the right time for pure pleasure," Pig Iron's James Sugg quipped outside the Painted Bride one night. He should know: Welcome to Yuba City, his company's rootin'-tootin' romp through the mythic American West, fairly dominated the festival in every regard. Loudly acclaimed, boundlessly entertaining — so what if it basically amounted to watching the prodigious Pigs goof around for 80 minutes? — the show sold out night after night, despite a full slate of 14 performances. (Mysteriously, that somehow didn't stop the Pigs from seeming nearly as omnipresent as Stuccio.)

Pig Iron had some competition in the pure-pleasure department from a couple of hot-ticket late-night Fringe offerings. Actually, make that purr-pleasure in the case of Johnny Showcase's delirious camp-cabaret Prince tribute (shh!) Purr, Pull, Reign, which hit all the right notes both musically and comically. Almost as side-splitting: the space-cadet sci-fi spoof The Annihilation Point, with Pig Iron's Dan Rothenberg moonlighting on direction.

Even the big-deal international acts seemed primarily focused on silliness and spectacle. Sure, there's plenty of historico-political baggage to unpack in Witold Gombròwicz's Operetta, which was imported lock, stock, camel and 22-person cast from Wroclaw, Poland. But even at a lavish three-plus hours, who had time to worry about that sort of thing, what with the extravagant ski-resort set, comprehension-defying melodrama, eye-popping outfits (and lack thereof) and general goofiness to be distracted, diverted and befuddled by? (Also, the camel.) Australia's Chunky Move offered the bombastic cyborg-dance-cum-laser light show Mortal Engine, which was visually arresting and darn nifty on a techno-geek level, though also a rather brutal assault on the senses.

For dazzle and daring, I was considerably more intrigued and impressed by the homegrown technological and synchronizational feats achieved in New Paradise Labs' Fatebook (and even more so by its truly innovative formal experimentation) and the physical and aesthetic ones in Brian Sanders' idiosyncratic crowd-pleaser Urban Scuba. The more focused, ostensibly higher-brow of Live Arts' dance offerings also had their share of flashy elements: the human Goldberg-contraption circus finale of Willi Dorner's delightful above under inbetween; the uncanny balance and focus demonstrated in Merián Soto's meditative Postcards from the Woods.

Two of the festival's most resonant and affecting pieces were among its quietest, though, typically enough, both were quite formally unorthodox and also frequently hilarious. Mike Daisey's The Last Cargo Cult— a freewheeling monologue interweaving memoir, jokes, a quasi-Marxist economics lecture and a South Seas travelogue — and Back to Back Theatre's small metal objects— a sweetly human-scaled drama played out in a public setting — each commented wittily and perceptively on the curious interplay of money in human societal relationships, perhaps offering a subtle reminder that life does indeed go on outside of the Fringe.

(ross.hoffman@citypaper.net)