Fest Bets

Our picks for what not to miss at the 2010 Fringe.

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Published: Sep 1, 2010

Sarah Kane, whose experimental explorations of psychological and physical violence made her one of the most polarizing figures in 1990s theater, is receiving a mini-revival in Philly. Come February, Luna Theater Co. will present her controversial first play, Blasted. Meanwhile, Fringe audiences can experience her work as North Carolina-based Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern is staging her final, most experimental piece: 4.48 Psychosis, a portrait of severe depression that was completed shortly before her 1999 suicide. LGP's director, Tom O'Connor, describes it as about "the trade-off between the intense, epiphanic experience of living on a knife's edge, nerves exposed and the impossibility of sustaining human relationships in such a state." Their production, which features a percussionist alongside two actors, is translated to the Fleisher Art Memorial from its original staging in an old Durham hosiery factory where, says company member Dana Marks, it felt "raw and nervy, like having a surgery go on 5 feet in front of you."

Sept. 4-6 and 9-12, $15, Fleisher Art Memorial, 719 Catharine St.

If you gazed into a crystal ball to see what choreographers will headline the Live Arts Festival in years to come, odds are you'd see some of the performers featured in 8. The showcase highlights up-and-coming dance creators, all of whom were commissioned to create a new work. There are of course, many young choreographers doing their thing in Philly, so why these particular eight? "They were folks we knew whose worked we liked and who we thought were really on the rise," says Nick Stuccio, the festival's producing director. If you're a Live Arts/Fringe aficionado, these faces (and bodies) will indeed look familiar — they've all been in festival shows created by colleagues. Now these chosen ones — Eun Jung Choi, Meg Foley, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Megan Mazarick, Shavon Norris, Jumatatu Poe, Olive Prince and Daniele Strawmyre — strut their own stuff for a fest that's helped bolster the careers of numerous Philly movement makers (such as Headlong Dance Theater, Brain Sanders/JUNK and SCRAP Performance Group). "We feel we've got to be looking for the next wave of artists," Stuccio says. "This is an occasion to give these folks a platform to see what they make and see if people like it." It's premature to call this a changing of the guard; still, the program presents a broad view of exciting new blood that's coursing through our dance community.

Sept. 7-12 (two choreographers per show), $25, Live Arts Studio, 919 N. Fifth St.

Gas & Electric Arts continues its evolution into a more experimental theater company. Between Trains — a play by Juanita Rockwell with music by Chas Marsh — asks, "What if you woke up lost and naked in a train station?" Lisa Jo Epstein directs the karmic, Alice-like adventures of Wendell (Mary Tuomanen) in G&E's distinctive physical, choreographic style, as seen in last year's première Cabinet of Wonders and 2008's Barrymore-nominated Anna Bella Eema.

Sept. 1-5, 8-13 and 15-19, $25, The Bardo, 1151 N. Third St.                                                                  

New York-based writer/performer/pamphleteer Alexis Clements has spent the last few years having a conversation with herself about the ways we all have conversations with each other. Driven by her nagging curiosity about one of life's little fundamental paradoxes — why something as seemingly straightforward as everyday social interaction results in so much complexity, anxiety and confusion — Clements has created a one-woman "mash-up between a lecture, an old-school, character-based, performance-art piece and a literal conversation." Conversation centers around Katharine, a woman who's attempted to address her deep-set social fears by developing a method for having "perfect conversations." But like most worthwhile interactions, it's not just a one-way enterprise: As she presents her ideas on effective communication (complete with amusingly pseudo-scientific diagrams), Katharine calls on audience members to test out the theories, and once the presentation has concluded she invites everyone to continue the discussion over wine and snacks, slyly revising the conventional post-show reception into an engaged "artistic" experience that either blurs the boundaries between performance and regular life or reveals how blurry those lines were to begin with. Heady stuff? Maybe, but don't worry about heavy-handed intellectualism: Despite the potentially stuffy setting of the Ethical Society basement, Clements promises the experience will be more like "an informal class run by a substitute teacher."

Sept. 9-12, $15, Philadelphia Ethical Society, 1906 Rittenhouse Square.

Director Ben Smallen and dramaturg Nelson Barre assert that Caryl Churchill's plays aren't seen enough, and moreover that the British playwright's Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? "is built for the Fringe." According to Barre, the 2006 romance about normal guy Guy (Chris Serpentine) and Sam (Will Windsor Erwin as, yes, America) "reaches out and grabs you with its stylistic approach and, most importantly, deals with American governmental and foreign policy, nationalism and love, which is about as immediate as you can get."

Sept. 3-5 and 8-9, $15, Walking Fish Theatre, 2509 Frankford Ave.

Most newlyweds expect color-coordinated china as wedding presents. But a wormhole? Barbara Pease Weber weaves a story about a just-married couple, Ashley and Greg, who receive a normal-looking cuckoo clock as a gift. When they attempt to set the time on the family heirloom, Ashley is magically transported to the past, and straight into the arms of her new husband's father. And — get this — she's prego. Which makes Greg her son. It's like Back to the Future with a side of Jerry Springer. Heavy!

Sept. 3-5, 7 and 10-12, $15, German Society of Pennsylvania, 611 Spring Garden St.                                 

Festival perennial Thaddeus Phillips wrapped up his peripatetic, pan-hemispheric Americas Trilogy two years ago. But he's already back at it with a revamped rendition of the trilogy's first installment, which premièred in 2005. All indications point to ¡El Conquistador! being classic Phillips fare, which means a mishmash of cultural references (including Colombian soap operas and, apparently, Hamlet), touches of screwball humor, deftly drawn, bumblingly likable characters (like telenovela-obsessed Bogotá doorman Polonio) and inventive, technologically ingenious design, all in the service of open-ended socio-cultural explorations with a well-honed balance of thoughtfulness and playfulness.

Sept. 8-11, $25-$30, Suzanne Roberts Theatre, 480 S. Broad St.

Andy Warhol, Billy Name, Nico: all Factory remnants who could barely speak above a whisper, let alone dance. Hell, Warhol damn near invented non-moving motion pictures. Yet here's Rev9 Dance and Performance Co., a Lancaster multimedia movement troupe taking on the myth and glitz of the Pop Art icon in his most formidable milieu, with his methed up minions in tow. Expect aerial work and acrobatics from artistic directors Kristin Pontz and Heather Bare — either it'll be very good, or it'll raise Edie from the grave. Or both.

Sept. 4, 4 and 8 p.m., $18, St. Stephen's Theater, 923 Ludlow St.                                                             

Adapted from Samuel Beckett's oft-forgotten 1945 novella, this dark comedy deals in harsh truths, sexual shamelessness and blunt, cringe-making humor. Put on by the Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland and starring longtime Beckett veteran Conor Lovett, this production should ooze Irish authenticity.

Sept. 3-5, $25-$30, Suzanne Roberts Theatre, 480 S. Broad St.

Like Twister without the plastic dial, Flat Intersections finds the bodies of four female dancers fused together through inspiration of emotions, natural rhythm and the simple exploration of the human form. Through video, music and photography, the quartet's search for humanity gets even more twisted.

Sept. 3-4, 7:30 p.m., $10, Performance Garage, 1515 Brandywine St.

During one of this summer's Live Arts previews with producing director Nick Stuccio, the leaders of these collaborating ensembles — New Paradise Laboratories' Whit MacLaughlin and The Riot Group's Adriano Shaplin — explained the lyrical differences between their troupes and what naturally drove them together. NPL is Philly's own dynamic, psychedelic, mostly movement-oriented democracy where the group members choose a pop culture topic (fraternities, social networks, Beatles) and explode it with hallucinatory, sensory-overloaded everything. TRG, visiting from New York, likes incendiary language and satirical tomes filled with phrases that run together and are performed in a confrontational fashion. Why not do a show together? After 10 minutes of listening to the speakers step on each other's conversations about Tea Party preeners, Log Cabin idealists and depressed Lincolns, the whole thing ran into one big mess — which is probably the point of FREEDOM CLUB, their conjoined look at political extremists, from assassin John Wilkes Booth to cultish Virginia radicals in the not-so-far-off future. The only thing more exciting than imagining a North-meets-South Civil War epic that goes beyond anything Robert Wilson did is trying to figure out which NPL member will wear the Lincoln stovepipe hat.

Sept. 2-5 and 8-11, $20-$30, Arts Bank, 601 S. Broad St.                                                                        

It's hard to say what to expect from The Groundswell Players' deadpan survivalist comedy about four people in the woods with a bear problem. But their stated inspirations — Moby Dick, Christopher Guest movies, that Project Grizzly guy with the bear-proof suit — hint at something strange and memorable.

Sept. 4, 6, 9, 12 and 17, $10, Mainstage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St.                                               

Theatre Exile launches both its 13th season and its new South Philly home, Studio X, with the Philadelphia première of Scottish playwright Rona Munro's prison drama, Iron. Barrymore Award-winners Catharine Slusar and Kim Carson play mother and daughter, trying to reconnect 15 years after a brutal murder. Deborah Block, a co-founder of the Live Arts and Fringe festivals, directs this taut mystery.

Sept. 9-12, 15-19, plus other performances through Oct. 10, $20, Studio X, 1340 S. 13th St.                      

Pianist/composer Gina Fontana and computer illustrator Corey Bechelli have been presenting their unique, affecting opus-in-progress for three years, but now they've finally declared it complete. That they spent so long on a piece which, in its finished form, lasts only 30 minutes offers some sense of the love and painstaking care that's gone into this deceptively simple creation: a vivid, varied series of loosely narrative images with ruminative solo piano accompaniment. Speaking about the show, Bechelli sounds searingly earnest: "We hope people leave the show in awe of the scope of the world around them, in love with the unending wonderment that is life, and humbled, excited and inspired to be a part of it."

Sept. 4, 8, 12, 16 and 18, 8 p.m., $10, First Unitarian Church, 2125 Chestnut St.

How do you see yourself? And what does that say about you? Participants in Linda Dubin Garfield's regular self-portrait workshops ponder these concerns as they learn to tell a life story through their own image. Yours might involve words wrapping a neckline, or a vaguely figurative blur. It could include a personal totem, or a telling, longing stare. Completed pieces can be taken home, or donated to the collection Garfield amasses with each workshop she presents.

Exhibit, ongoing; workshops, Sept. 12 and 15, 2 p.m., free, Book Trader, 7 N. Second St.

Whether you're enlightening close pals or an inquisitive stranger, proclaiming your sexual preference is something many LGBTQers deal with on the regular. Developed from real-life interviews, Love-Nothing emphasizes the coming-out experience of three distinct individuals through monologue and multi-character interaction. Director Pete Haas says the content, which ranges from comedic to somber, is ideal for audiences on both sides of the fence because it dispels a common assumption that coming out of the closet is a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am encounter. "There are consequences to [coming out]," he says. "It's something you have to deal with every day."

Sept. 3-5 and 10-12, $15, William Way Community Center, 1315 Spruce St.                                               

The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium's artistic director, Tina Brock, calls Jean Giradoux's 1943 absurdist comedy about a Paris oil-well-drilling scheme "less fantastic and absurd than this morning's headlines." Today, Giradoux's forward-thinking vision of lapsing etiquette, marauding pimps and environmental disregard feels as realistic as BP's well-cam. "And then," Brock asserts, "there's the old 'who's nuts and who ain't' issue — people not conforming and how this sets the stage for anarchy. In an age of 'whatever' as a reasonable response, when people pursue a passion with vigor, there is some question as to why they are so committed." The Madwoman, now more than ever, provides shocking answers.

Sept. 3-5, 7-12 and 14-18, $20, Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5, 825 Walnut St.

EgoPo Classic Theater launches its season exploring Antonin "Theater of Cruelty" Artaud's avante-garde theories with Peter Weiss' controversial 1964 hit The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, better known as Marat/Sade. Director Brenna Geffers (who staged EgoPo's Waiting for Godot last spring) says Weiss addresses a societal pattern of electing, trusting and then rejecting leaders: "What does action mean if we end up with the same complaints over and over again?" Marat/Sade unfolds in a grim 1808 French asylum, where infamous Sade (David Blatt), confined for blasphemy and sexual deviancy, rallies inmates to overcome their paranoia, erotomania and other infirmities to create a play about Jean-Paul Marat's murder and the bloody French Revolution. In West Philly's Sanctuary at the Rotunda, the action will envelope the audience: "We looked at many wonderful, cool, burnt-out venues," Geffers explains, "but The Rotunda has this amazing sense of being haunted when you first walk in." We might each detect our own political frustrations in Marat/Sade — as the asylum director says, "We are all revolutionaries these days!" — and that's OK with Geffers. "The fact that this play is as relevant today as it was when it was written is part of the terror of it. It proves its own thesis by saying — 200 years ago, 50 years ago, one year ago — the same conundrum exists. And the beat goes on."

Sept. 3-5, 9-13 and 15-18, $20, Sanctuary at The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St.                                              

Norristown's theatrical treasure, Iron Age Theatre, ventures into Center City with its renowned Marx in Soho, late muckraker Howard Zinn's one-man show about the father of communism. Marx called religion "the opiate of the masses," a view he might revise if he could experience today's television and Internet. Bob Weick, who grew that iconic gray beard for the role, plays Marx defending his political, social and economic ideas with wit and gusto. Bring a Tea Partier whose head you want to explode.

Sept. 8, 11-12 and 18, $15, Twelve Gates Art Gallery, 305 Cherry St.

"Not overwhelmingly Fringey" — that's how producer Thomas Reap describes Mindless Drivel, the one-man show he created with fellow Temple Theater grads John Beecher (actor/writer) and Benjamin White (director). The show's 17 separate skits send the audience bouncing from an African desert to a psychiatrist's chair, comedy to drama. The show isn't suitable for audiences under 18 because of "strong language and adult subject matter." Drivel is the first Fringe event to appear at the Annenberg. "We shot high," Reap says with pride.

Sept. 3-4 and 9-11, 8 p.m., $20, Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 3680 Walnut St.                      

Lest you think grief is no laughing matter, improv comedienne Mary Carpenter begs to differ. She's out to prove it via The New & Improved Stages of Grief, inspired by her own real-life encounters with bereavement. Condolence cards, eulogies, etiquette and escapism tactics (like TV-watching marathons and binge shopping) are all wrapped up in this solo act designed to bring tears to your eyes: the kind you get from laughing, that is.

Sept. 7-8 and 10-11, 7 p.m., $10, Second Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St.                                    

Yo, now that youse are back from downashore, it's the perfect time to check out The Real Housewives of South Philly. A send-up of Bravo's Housewives series by sketch comedy troupe the Waitstaff, it's got three gal pals bickering over typical South Philly stuff, like parking cones and who has the best window display of the baby Jesus. These ladies have big hair, big mouths and are the big draw; however, the show does include bits about other stuff, too. As Waitstaffer James Boyle says, "We basically spoof or attack anything in society."

Sept. 5, 8, 12, 14, 16 and 19, $15, L'Etage Cabaret, 624 S. Sixth St.

The steamer SS Elisabeth hauled passengers and parcels along the Atlantic coast circa 1870. It's also playwright Gerhardus van Wilgen's new museum theater piece, developed "to create a dialogue with the past, but not a history lesson." The audience strolls the Independence Seaport Museum, encountering the Elisabeth's passengers and crew. "It's a game, in a way," says van Wilgen. "Only by asking the right questions and finding the right tone will audience get answers, but I'm hoping the past will provide some sort of mirror on our own lives, because characters will be asking questions, as well."

Sept. 7-8, 6 p.m., $20, Independence Seaport Museum, 211 S. Columbus Blvd.                                          

Takes

Moving images — both live bodies and cinematic representations of them — overlap in the duet TAKES, a dazzling piece that incorporates sound, film and dance. As the performers' bodies twirl individually or playfully "dogfight," a video camera projects fragments on a scrim that surrounds the stage on all sides. Viewers are asked to "participate" by walking around the screens and "editing" the live performance and projections; a soundtrack adds another dimension. These are the "takes" of the title — what director/performer/choreographer Nichole Canuso calls "the multiple iterations of the moment. ... The pull between what's actually happening in the space and the chosen angle that you see it — both are there at the same time." This tension is reflected in the piece — performed by Canuso and longtime colleague Dito van Reigersberg — as the "tug" between the live and the recorded body; the idea is to challenge how people record memories or perceive reality. By taking in multiple images, audiences remember what they see, think and feel more vividly. TAKES artfully captures that friction, while creating a hypnotic, dreamlike atmosphere.

Sept. 3-5, 7-8, 10-11 and 17-18, $25-$30, Theater West at the Hub, 626 N. Fifth St.                                  

Abi Morgan's Tiny Dynamite follows the trials and tribulations of two boyhood friends who are total opposites but always find themselves falling for the same woman — including their mutual first love. This summer, a new woman, Madeleine — who faintly resembles a girl they once knew — enters their lives. Will history repeat itself?

Sept. 9-12 and 16-18, $15, Second Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St.

If red noses and tiny bicycles give you the creeps, you might want to take a pass on Untitled Project #213, the story of a sad clown who's a psychiatrist's guinea pig in his study on mutes. Why the long face? Through dance, poetry and music, Jenn Rose, Steve Pacek and Dan Kazemi get to the bottom of a clown who's lost his mojo — and his voice.

Sept. 3-5, $15, Walnut Street Theatre Independence Studio on 3, 825 Walnut St.                                       

The Media Mobilizing Project isn't looking to define Philadelphia or its people with this full program of poetry, music, performance, visual arts and assorted kitchen sinkery. The idea is to show you your hometown from angles you might not have considered before.

Sept. 3-4 and 10-11, 7 p.m., $5, Media Mobilizing Project Community Room, 4205 Chestnut St., second floor.

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