nytheatre Archive
FringeNYC 2000

SHOW REVIEWS ON THIS PAGE: VELVET ROPES, WHY MUD FLAPS?, THE BIG TENT SHOW, BUDDY MOVIE, FAG/HAG, CRUCES, THE EXPATRIATES, FRANKENCLOWN

VELVET ROPES by Martin Denton · August 20, 2000
Joshua Scher's new play Velvet Ropes is almost certainly the sharpest new comedy in Fringe NYC; his is likewise the most original new comic voice to emerge in quite some time. The premise of this hilarious yet cerebral homage to Waiting for Godot is simple: two naifs, called Everyone and Everybody, get trapped in a modern art gallery. At first, they amuse themselves trying to figure out what they're looking at: a painting identified as a nude, for example, yields some serious scrutiny until one of them finally shouts out "I think I see a breast!" But it's not long before their superficial perusal of art gives way to Superficial Perusal of Art; and now all of us, along with Everyone and Everybody, have to figure out what we're looking at. Velvet Ropes slyly and cannily plays with ideas about what constitutes art, humor, and theatre, disguising the whole ontological debate shrewdly as a vaudeville comedy turn. Yet when its two heroes contemplate themselves in a mirror ("disturbing," one of them comments); or when they find themselves trapped inside the museum's omnipresent velvet ropes and seem to become Art themselves--well, there's never any question that there's more going on here than non-stop hilarity. Velvet Ropes has been beautifully directed by Matt August, and it's played to perfection by the remarkable young actors Royden Mills and Jonathan Uffelman. These two natural clowns lock gears so precisely that you'd think they'd been working together for decades; their performances are incontestably among the best at this year's Festival. Ditto Scher's smart, startling writing: I predict we'll be hearing more from all three of these young men in the seasons to come.
WHY MUD FLAPS? by Martin Denton · August 20, 2000
Ellen K. Anderson's millennium play Why Mud Flaps? is thoughtful, sweet, touching, and profound. That millennium identifier may set off some warning bells, some nine months after the big Y2K brouhaha: don't let it. In the first place, what Anderson has to say about millennial fever is wise and timeless and absolutely worth hearing. And in the second place, the millennium nearing its close in Why Mud Flaps? is the next one, not the last: this play is set on December 31, 2999. But this is no sci-fi extravaganza. While it's clear that some sort of cataclysmic event has changed things on Earth in these intervening thousand years, Anderson's main concern is with the stuff that hasn't changed one bit, i.e., the precious, strange, and wonderful tangle of human relationships. Why Mud Flaps? finds Axel, a young man from 1999, mysteriously transported to a New Year's Eve 2999 party at the home of Smith Sequoia. Smith, a connoisseur of ancient artifacts, is entertaining his friends Victor and Isabella; attending Smith is his servant Harley Quince. Harley is in love with Smith and Smith is in love with Isabella; Victor is in love simply with the idea of being in love. Once Axel is discovered in Smith's garden, with his homemade Y2K time capsule in tow, the mismatched couples get themselves sorted out. And Axel's own lost love, for whom he waited miserably and alone on his own New Year's Eve, reaches across the centuries to reclaim him. Plays like Why Mud Flaps? are a rarity these days: there's not a drop of irony or cynicism in sight; just the unwavering optimism and faith in humanity and love of a gentle and caring spirit. It's a real treat, especially--of all places--in Fringe NYC. As played by director Heather Ondersma and an excellent quintet of actors, it's also one of the most polished and satisfying events of the Festival.
THE BIG TENT SHOW by KIDS Editor Julie · August 24, 2000
It is very seldom that the word ‘magic’ truly applies to a performance, however, I believe that The Big Tent Show is exactly that. For an hour, Mark Mitton comes on and does tricks that completely amaze you. He does card tricks, money tricks, fire tricks and who knows what all else (but what I do know is that every one of these tricks is fantastic). One of the most astonishing aspects of the show is that so much of it is done with audience members. Quite incredible is when he has one member of the audience levitate another spectator. However, in my eyes, the unsurpassable moment of the evening was when he asked my nine-year-old sister and I to come up on stage. Prior to this he had asked the audience for any odd objects they might have. Among what he received were a pager, keys, lipstick, a hat and, perhaps the oddest item, underwear. Once on stage, he pulled the underwear from behind my head, he had us put our hands around the pager and keys, say "vanish" and indeed, when we opened our hands they were gone. Although all of these were miraculous tricks, the most remarkable moment was when he went to a man in the third or fourth row, took from him a sealed envelope, brought it to my sister and asked her to open it. "Do you know what this is?" he questioned her. "Yeah," she said "it’s my watch!!" As you can see Mark Mitton puts on a marvelous show, filled with humor (such as his opening song "Where Have all the Adverbs Gone?"), and, mainly, mind-boggling tricks.
BUDDY MOVIE by Tim Cusack · August 24, 2000
Dear Tony Vellela: I saw your play Buddy Movie last night, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it all day! As a homosexual, it always swells my heart with pride to see complex gay characters, such as your Mitch, come to life on the stage. In this day of watered-down, almost cuddly, queer role models such as Jack on Will and Grace, it’s so refreshing to find a playwright who doesn’t pull any punches when he writes a gay man. I agree that its about time we all had a little reminder that gay people are every bit as screwed up, no, more screwed up than your average straight person. If I may be so bold, however, I would like to suggest a few improvements to the gay character you might consider making for when your script gets sold to Hollywood or transfers to Off-Broadway. You got so much of him right: his loneliness; his inability to maintain any sort of meaningful sexual relationship; the way he manipulates his straight best friend (honey, we all do it!) to further his pathetic career; his fixation on having sex with said friend despite the tsunami of evidence pointing to the impossibility of that ever happening. So with all humility I submit to you the following suggestions: (1) You failed to give Mitch a drag alter ego. All gay men have drag alter egos. I would suggest something along the lines of Bruschetta Caché. (2) At no point did Mitch go to his turntable and put on either the original cast album of Do I Hear A Waltz, Sutherland in Lucia di Lammermoor or Madonna’s Ray of Light album—to help “relax” his friend. I for one have met many a deadline and made many a conquest with the Material Mom’s help. (3) He was far too sober for the balance of the play. Did you not study Tennessee Williams in playwriting school? All pathetic, spineless gays are at the very least heavy drinkers and more often completely broken alcoholics. You could also throw in a prescription drug addiction for added spice. (4) I really think you held back from where the play needed to go. After all, you had the gay character lure the straight character to his underground apartment under the ludicrous premise that they had to bang out a complete movie script in one week, the straight character having never written a word of movie dialogue in his entire life. The actor playing the gay character is obviously encouraged to play him in the creepiest manner possible. Why he’s practically Peter Lorre! My three year-old niece can see what’s coming next. Of course Psycho Fag has to then make a pass at Straight Boy, be rebuffed, turn REALLY psycho, and be killed in an act of self-defense. With buddies like that, who needs enemies?
FAG/HAG by Martin Denton · August 22, 2000
The thing that I like best about fag/hag is the way it turns trendy documentary theatre on its ear: you'll find no political message here; no subtle proselytizing; no agendas, hidden or otherwise. Instead, you'll find this now- popular theatrical form used--brilliantly--in the service of that most time-honored of theatrical missions: to tell stories, sensitively and forthrightly, in the words of some very interesting, very insightful people. People, I might add, who probably wouldn't otherwise be given an opportunity to talk publicly about the subject at hand. fag/hag is an exploration of gay men and the loving but platonic friendships they often have with women. The title is perhaps reductive, but the meat of this light-hearted but ultimately serious look at these relationships is substantial indeed. And, as performed by Kate Nugent and Joe Salvatore (who also created and assembled the show), it's funny, enlightening, and surprisingly moving.
CRUCES by Rebecca Ramirez-Haskell · August 20, 2000
Shouting of "Shut the #%@ up!" by a tenant across the street from Charas/El Bohio filled the sacred space and environment created by the experimental theater company Me xih co Teatro. If you asked him what he thought of this Fringe Festival and this Mexican Theater company I assure you he would promptly return to his profanity. This tenant not only was hearing unfamiliar language, drumming, and the echoing of cathedral bells through his beauty sleep, he also found himself sleep-walking to his window and dreaming that someone was on top of the Charas chapel peak waiting to commit suicide. What kept him from dialing 911? He actually wanted that lunatic to jump off and shut up. Little did he know that sitting 25 feet away from him on a cold set of bricks were spectators waiting intensely for Jesus to jump from the top of this 5-story building and into a 2 foot deep swimming pond. Do you call this action part of "new world" theater or an insane risk taking stunt? Some would disapprove of both, I however am impressed by this physicality and earthbound sense of theater. The mix of story traveled all over the place, it was a bit unclear as to what the playwright was intending, the writing was like a collaboration of Nietzsche, Dante, James Joyce and the Bible, resulting in a post-apocalyptic passion play in an inferno that has Jesus continually dying for our sins. Each performer was a biblical character and Jesus had to accept his death and abolish hell. Though the writing in Cruces* itself was disjointed and some of the screaming deliverance could have been done without, I felt that the one hour of non-secular drama made up in other ways. Walking into the space alone was good for the soul. One entered a beautifully lit courtyard where a pool filled with water stood at centerstage and brown paper bags surrounded the white candles, crosses hammered into the floor as if laying above recent burials. The collision of performance and space drew near to something unknown, it was filled with Spanish poetry, ritualistic dancing and chants, performers walking perpendicular to walls, and other visually stimulating images.
THE EXPATRIATES by Tim Cusack · August 21, 2000
F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at the age of 44. Zelda Fitzgerald perished in a fire at the age of 48. Ernest Hemingway shot himself at the age of 61. Two of Sarah Murphy’s sons succumbed at an early age. Dorothy Parker lived longer than any of them, but was suicidal and alcoholic for much of her life. This death penumbra darkens all of the characters in the Beggars Group production, The Expatriates. In fact the show takes a perverse glee in reminding us that death was the guest of honor at this Parisian bohemia’s parties from the start. Take the opening: Scott, Dotty, Ernest, Sarah and Zelda all emerge from a single coffin like clowns in some macabre circus. The effect is very funny and, needless to say, rather disturbing. These ghosts are exiled from us by more than distance. They are also in crisis. Zelda has dared to write a novel, or in the imagery of this production birthed a novel, that uses the lives of the Fitzgeralds' inner circle as its seminal fluid. Director Elizabeth Maher and her colleagues play fast and loose with the truth around this event—Zelda’s novel, Save Me the Waltz, didn’t come into existence until 1932, after the Fitzgeralds had returned to the U.S.; the play implies that her book was never published, though it in fact was; and it’s doubtful that Dorothy Parker ever visited the couple in Paris. Obviously then Maher is after something other than documentary realism; she is crafting instead a meditation on women’s creativity and their right to claim literary immortality, one of the few antidotes to death’s obliteration. Zelda’s book splits the group asunder. Parker dismisses it as merely a manifesto. Hemingway takes potshots at her with his rifle in the garden. Sarah, on the other hand, lends support to her friend. At one point everyone literally tears the book to shreds. The women in this world are particularly fascinating for the choices they represent. Sarah, the wife of painter Gerald Murphy, has accepted her role as traditional helpmate/mother/hostess. Parker is the professional writer, but she is careful not to engage the boys on their own territory or make any grandiose claims for her talent. She limits her writing to short stories and what she self-deprecatingly refers to as “verse.” Zelda, on the other hand, refuses either category. She is impetuous, demanding, vain and quite possibly a genius. She is neither helpmate nor afraid to do battle in the arena of the novel with the men. The price for this is her marriage and her sanity; her reward, the continual fascination with her life and work. Maher’s production is full of wonderful expressionist touches from the costumes to the sound design, and her cast is uniformly solid. However, the high pitch at which much of the action has been staged ultimately grows wearisome. I started to wish for a dash of the restraint that made Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Parker touchstones for their era.
FRANKENCLOWN by Kenneth Urban · August 24, 2000
Clowns are popular this year at Fringe NYC, Frankenclown being only one of at least three plays that prominently feature the grease-painted jesters with their wonderfully large red noses. This production by the John Brown Theatre is an adaptation of the Frankenstein story as seen through the eyes of Eric Davis, Alexander Kipp (the director) and the rest of the John Brown theatre ensemble. They imagine the tragedy of Victor Frankenstein and his monster as a spastic burlesque where Victor is a clown discovered by a group of sailors at the North Pole. Victor recounts to Captain Samuel Walton his bizarre tale. He tells of his clown family, his tortured days at university and, of course, the creation of his murderous monster and its aftermath, complete with an impressive body count. While the story is a familiar one, Frankenclown never fails to surprise with its off-kilter and often extremely funny channeling of Frankenstein as a freak show. The cast as a whole are amazingly energetic and each one possesses a body of rubber. For the duration of the show, Flick Divits (AKA Eric Davis) contorts his body all over the stage as Victor Frankenstein and Flick's fellow cast members keep up with his comedic intensity. Chad Rasty (AKA Nick Dowd) as the Monster and Bumo Bame (AKA Nicholas Jumara) as the mausoleum caretaker are especially agile and entertaining performers. While not for everyone, the show's dark humor (the sex scene at the mausoleum is a good example of Frankenclown's love of the skewed) made me and my fellow audience members laugh out loud. Frankenclown is not without its faults. At an hour and half, the play could use some judicious editing to speed up the show's pace, especially given how well-known the story is. And those theatregoers looking for a profound revision of what the Frankenstein story means at the end of the millennium are advised to look elsewhere. What the play lacks, however, in profundity, it often makes up for in verve, snappy direction and great 80s electro-pop (Ah, early Depeche Mode still sounds great). Lovers of the ludicrous are advised to check out Frankenclown. It won't change your life or make you see the world anew. But who ever said all theatre had to do that?