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nytheatre Archive
FringeNYC 2002

SHOW REVIEWS ON THIS PAGE: Wet Blue & Friends, In The Swing, Men Do Not Go To War Over Women, Deviant, The Black Box, The Belly Button Dream, Anathemas, Bang, Duct, Body Maps, Red White Black And Blue, Of (H)air, Hugs, And Hospitals

WET BLUE & FRIENDS
by Saviana Condeescu
I have never thought that the word buoyancy might be embodied in such a delightful, literal way as it is in Clare Byrne’s dance piece Wet Blue & Friends, which has already gained some downtown fame after being performed at Dixon Place and some other venues.

Clare creates a memorable character, a Chaplinesque guy in a blue, dirty, too-large suit, with swimming goggles on his white bathing cap, and a children’s book name: Wet Blue. His adventures take place in a subway car, a public bathroom, and a bar, before getting to his natural habitat, the swimming pool. Thirty pink dresses and costumes hang from the ceiling like ghosts from a tattered sub-world while Wet Blue encounters various no-goodniks, prostitutes, and a self-absorbed media anchor.

With the help of three movable chairs and a few expressive dancers (Donna Bouthillier, Sarah Carlson, Ruben Ortiz and Theresa Palazzo) Wet Blue’s funny and sad story in the urban jungle is recounted in a charming, inspired manner that succeeds in revealing the loners’ and outcasts’ poetry in daily life.

The communion of pathetic and comic (a paradox that Kierkegaard dreamt of) is joyously translated into movement and gesture. Clare Byrne’s choreography and performance sweep a seduced audience into a blue-and-pink humorous and dramatic world, a colored live version of old black-and-white movies.

Aretha Franklin’s blues is mixed with toilet flushing noises, ballet is intermingled with pantomime, and dreams are overlapped with reality in this must-see show whose tragic undertones enhance its special freshness and beauty.
IN THE SWING
by Erik Sniedze
Lara Mottolo’s In The Swing might be an exercise in writing for Pamela Anderson’s VIP or the sequel to the Charlie’s Angels. Or maybe it’s not. Swing uses a formula we know all too well. Three women use their sex to fool men and make money. They have secret identities: Blondie, Joni Mitchell, and Billie Holiday (Krystin MacRitchie, Maria Teresa Creasey, and Eleni Elopoulos respectively). They use clichés like "Mickey Mouse operation" and sexual innuendos like "Up and Running" or "You’re going to get it"; sometimes they’re clever, as in "Charm and cleavage can only get you so far." But, Mottolo’s game plan for their money-making scheme involving an 8 billion dollar robbery is ludicrous and unintelligible. The plot makes less sense than those acting interludes in a 99 cent porno. You zone out while waiting for the inevitable sex scene.

There aren’t any graphic sex acts. Aaron Rhyne’s gratuitous direction is about as unerotic as you can get and still be offensive to women. Rhyne’s stage business for these tough cookies includes reapplying lipstick, filing and painting finger nails, snapping shut make-up compacts, taking detailed notes on a waitress order sized notebook, and dropping pencils so that the women can bend over for crotch shots. Billie Holiday actually fans her crotch while lying on a desk consulting a bank employee on a transaction. Thankfully, the director has refrained from making anyone wax their bikini line to pass the time. Hopefully with the expected 8 billion, they won’t have to manicure themselves every spare second.

The gaping plot oversight is that these women robbers never carry guns or explosives for this bank job. At one point Blondie uses an unhelpful tape measure. She also gets her picture on Page Six in a burglar mask (?). Was I to assume that there was a Prada label on said mask, or that there was a celebrity nearby, or that the robbery was not newsworthy enough for the Metro Section?

Oh, and there are four good-looking guys who get duped by these disastrous developments. Yuval David is especially handsome in handcuffs. But, to be fair, there really isn’t much of a script or direction for any of these actors to act. Maybe another episode of In The Swing will prove more successful. Or maybe not.
FROM TABLE MOUNTAIN TO TELUK INTAN
by Andrea Somberg
Helen is the face that launched 1000 ships and thus the reason for the Trojan War. But, this appropriately titled play proves without a doubt that Men do not go to War over Women; they go to war over greed, hate, and envy. In this imaginative retelling of the Trojan War through the eyes of both Helen and Klytemnestra, Gina Landor is a one-woman tour de force, having adapted the play herself and playing both Helen and Klytemnestra brilliantly and with commanding stage presence. She treats us to a history lesson, of love, hatred, and ultimately forgiveness and redemption.

We start out witnessing Helen’s flush of erotic love for Paris, and her restlessness to become something more than just someone’s possession. The next scene is ten years later, where we meet Klytemnestra. She reveals the true reasons for this war (boredom, power and money) and tells us that life is about "…power or lack of it—there is nothing else." We learn of her defining moment, when her husband Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia for political and religious reasons, bringing to life Klytemnestra’s thirst for vengeance. Here Landor is strong, hard, and full of resolution as she tells her husband that he is not a war hero but a weak man, and then dispenses her revenge. In the final scene, we return to a more contemplative Helen, five years after the war, as she reflects on her choices, and the choices made by those she loves.

Adapted from Andrew Rissik’s BBC radio drama Troy, this tale is superbly directed by Sladjana Vujovic and feels intensely collaborative. It is beautifully told through sound, extraordinary visuals and lighting. When both women recall the fall of Troy, the images are evocative and chilling, calling to mind the wars of the last millennia, from the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia to the events of September 11.

This production is a vivid reminder of the excuses and reasons that men, and, to be fair, women, use to go to war. Do not miss this show; it is an extraordinary and extremely important work of art.
DEVIANT
by Soline McLain
For a play with subject matter that could be offensive to some, Deviant is so well directed, staged, and acted that the piece is both hilarious and disturbing…just what a FringeNYC show should be! As the audience enters the Kraine Theatre for a performance of Deviant, the actors are already onstage welcoming them to a fetish club. (But don’t be frightened away, this is not an audience participation show.) In Deviant, excerpts from actual phone sex conversations are interspersed with the central story of a man (Marshall) who gets turned on by bugs being squashed by high-heeled shoes. At the fetish club, he hires a girl who does not like people so only "fucks" carrots. They each go on to tell their stories of the development of their "deviant" sexual behaviors.

Randy Harrison (of the series "Queer as Folk") and Marci Adilman are strong central figures as Marshall and the "Carrotfucker," respectively. Both actors manage to make their characters endearing to the point that one begins to feel sorry for those who do not seem to have "normal" sexual lives. Supporting Harrison and Adilman is a strong ensemble of stellar performers who play multiple roles from phone sex operators to characters from Marshall and the Carrotfucker’s past. Some of the funniest moments are found in the surrealist "ballets" of the piece, one of which is between Marshall’s parents, while the other is between Guilt and Lust. Sara Trachtenberg and Emily Parker both stand out with their expressive characterizations in their various roles. Rob DeRosa’s "Satanfucker" monologue is also a highlight of the show.

Directors Melissa Boswell and Jane Steinberg (along with the help of fight choreopgrapher Jim Cairl) have done an extraordinary job in bringing Deviant and its unique characters to life. So, don’t be deviant, get out there and see Deviant!
THE BLACK BOX
by Aaron Leichter
The phrase "black box" can have several meanings: a theatre whose configuration can be rearranged to suit the production, a type of camera, or, most ominously, the flight recorder that relays information on a plane crash. The Black Box, the title of the FringeNYC offering from Theater SKAM, fits all of these meanings together nicely in a jigsaw puzzle of a play at University Settlement. The first strand follows the Wright Brothers as they realize the ageless dream of flight. The second story shows the myth of Icarus, on the cusp of adulthood, flying too close to the sun. Balanced between these well-known tales is the little-known account of a young man who was killed by his fellow passengers.

This last, true story forms the evening’s backbone as the young man, Mason, discusses his lover, a photographer named Jane, and his fear of flying. But the play’s strength comes from the tone struck by shifting back and forth between the stories: the exuberance of the Wright Brothers, the yearning of Icarus, the panic of Mason. The fourth compass point is Jane, as she explains exactly how a camera captures an image. Like flight and love, there is an element of magic to photography: all three ideas are somehow lighter than air, and contain a mortal danger: "Man isn’t meant to fly; and it all comes crashing down," explains Mason.

Happily, playwright/director Amiel Gladstone and her company weave these stories together with a simplicity belied by the complex ideas. Actors switch from scene to scene with a casual shift of the shoulders and voice as the lighting redirects the audience’s focus. Only a few props are used—seven, in fact, not including three chairs. And Andrew Tugwell’s soundscape evokes entire worlds and atmospheres but never overwhelms the actors.

In short, The Black Box works well because it deals honesty with its audience and its characters. It’s a small show, tightly contained within its hour of playing time, but reaches for the sublime in those minutes. With the anniversary of the World Trade Center disaster impending, it’s impossible for this play not to resonate. As Orville and Wilbur Wright solve the problems of manned flight, the audience recovers the wonder that flying can inspire.
THE BELLY BUTTON DREAM
by Sarika Chawla
It’s short and it’s bizarre. It’s puppetry featuring people. The Incredible Edible Puppet Company’s The Belly Button Dream features a little girl named Katie (Katharine A. Brehm) who relives a nightmarish dream in a Freudian frenzy. With a giant papier-mâché belly button strapped on to her waist, Katie emerges from a cardboard house to meet her mother. Only it’s not her mother, it’s the Alpha Mother (David Sicherman), clad in a flowing green dress and a cardboard blond wig. When he tries to stick his tongue in her belly button, a crowd of mothers storm out and mayhem ensues. Over the course of the next thirty minutes, this scene is played and replayed in many different ways, each of them eerie and unique.

The performance is oddly disturbing, and perhaps, as the cast discusses after the show, it’s because the belly button is an emotionally charged topic that few people talk about. Or perhaps it is the vision of three stone-faced men in housedresses and yellow cardboard wigs skittering and stomping about the stage and waggling their tongues. As the scenes are repeated, the performance becomes somewhat lackluster, accentuating the show’s rough edges. However, Brehm, who also directed the piece, stands out as she bubbles with energy as a confused yet strong-willed little girl. Performances by Sicherman (who is truly creepy as the Alpha Mother) and dancer Holly Seidel also shine as they throw themselves wholeheartedly into their roles. It’s a strange journey, but The Belly Button Dream is certainly a trip into offbeat creativity and offers up a whole new perspective into the fine art of puppetry.
ANATHEMAS
by Jeffrey Lewonczyk
Re-reading the FringeNYC program guide's description of Anathemas, by Venezuela's Proyecto Artistico Fusion, I discovered a remarkable portrait of a company cleaning up its mess in advance: "Anathemas goes beyond the rules and regulations that dictate understanding." (i.e., "We do not claim that this show makes any sense.") It continues: "They are connected more than by perfection, by the fifth essence of a no verbal [sic] communication." (i.e., "It's messy, and if you don't get it, you're just not tuned in.")

That being said, how refreshing it was to find a Fringe show that so easily fits in with our culture's derogatory preconceptions of what "Fringe" can mean! Director/choreographer Lic. Miguel Angel Baloa has diligently studied page after page from the Avant-Garde Handbook, and has neglected no opportunity to bombard the audience with hysterical High-Art nonsense. I had a strong sense that the performance I saw was mostly, if not fully, improvised, so I can't make any promises, but if you decide to go, expect to encounter: an aggregate of random-seeming, arty props (including the requisite creepy, devil-dolls); a man wearing nothing but cellophane wrapping and a gas mask, who quite literally drags reluctant audience members into the fray; long, long stretches of empty, awkward silence… and that's about it, actually. No indication was given that the show had ended—after the saran-wrapped figure left the stage, ripping off his plastic sheath, and didn't come back after ten minutes, I assumed the show was over, and left. I could easily have been wrong; even a company member, sitting in the house and videotaping, didn't seem to know what was going on. But the half-hour running time was up, so I don't feel bad. The only thing I know for sure is that, as an audience member, I've never felt so superfluous in my life.

However, I feel a little bad bashing a group that traveled all the way from South America to be in the Festival. (And besides, this is the first production I've ever seen that attempted to use the Theatorium's perennially leaky roof to its advantage.) Therefore I'll end with a semi-sincere salute: Hats off to Proyecto Artistico Fusion for keeping alive the tradition of ponderous, incomprehensible theatre that is meant to be "deep." Long live the Avant-Garde!
BANG
by Richard Stroker
Twenty-six years ago Lily Tomlin and Robin Williams apparently had a love child. Her name is C.C. Seymour. The NYC Fringe Festival gives us the opportunity to witness Seymour’s comic genius in her one-woman show, aptly titled Bang, which opened fire at the Kraine Theater on Friday night.

Seymour has Tomlin’s ability to immerse herself in wacky yet real characters. She has Williams’ rocket-fueled energy, impressive vocal sound effects and ability to seamlessly segue from one character to another. Her stage presence has supreme confidence and control which allows her to utterly lose control within her many characters, much to the audience’s benefit.

Bang is a poignant and hilarious tale of a woman coming of age. It deals with childhood fantasies, friends, parents, school, braces, acne, puberty, popularity, masturbation, boys, dating, cars, teachers, booze, sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll with uncanny tact and tastefulness.

Seymour wrote the script, along with the music and lyrics. She’s accompanied by a fun three-piece rock band (Dan Barnhill, Doug Thoms, Louis Tucci). Eric Loeb’s direction is flawless. The excellent lighting design is by Christopher Weston.

Bang proves what an outright gas it can be attending live theatre in New York. It’s infinitely more entertaining than anything on TV—Seymour has more comedic talent in the dirt under the fingernail of her left pinky than the entire cast of "Saturday Night Live."

This show is a must-see for anyone who loves to laugh.
DUCT
by Anthony Pennino
Stephanie Shaw—playwright and performer of Duct, produced by Chicago’s Neo-Futurists—reports during the course of her performance that her sister thinks her shows are "sick and twisted." Shaw, recognizing that neither is necessarily a negative quality, has crafted a superb one-woman show that is one of the true treats of this year’s FringeNYC Festival.

Let me say right now that I am not a big fan of the monologue show. Duct, however, transcends the inherent pitfalls of the form and is a provoking, startling, and entertaining theatrical event. I am not sure which I liked more: Shaw as an actress or Shaw as writer.

As an actor, she has that rare quality to convey empathy, intelligence, and passion all at once. From the moment she enters, all eyes are upon her. In a medium that requires that the performer be extremely appealing, Shaw never wears out her welcome.

As a writer, she weaves magic. Duct is basically a series of monologues about Shaw’s life as a mother of three. She talks about her fantasies, her father’s death, and her sister as well. Her words frequently display the lyricism of Dylan Thomas. And her concerns are the concerns of James Joyce in Ulysses: the focus on the mundane day-to-day events of life as reflective of some greater search for a more universal meaning. Indeed, there were many moments during the course of Duct that I felt that Shaw was the 21st century’s inheritor of Molly Bloom from Joyce’s seminal work.

Not everything makes perfect logical sense. But Shaw is an artist who knows that art needs to make emotional sense and not necessarily rational sense. She even pokes fun at her own choice of closing music—an Irish folk song, though she is not Irish—but reveals (and rightly!) that it is a fitting end to her show because it feels right. Shaw says at one point, "I have never been adventurous enough to fuck a dream." Maybe not, but she is adventurous enough to reveal herself, warts and all, in a funny, honest, and challenging way.
BODY MAPS
by J Grawemeyer
The kind of work I saw in Body Maps is the reason I see theatre rather than movies. Theatre, whether kitchen-sink drama or performance art, communicates the human experience through performer to audience, helping us figure out who we are and what life is supposed to be about. Body Maps does not answer those questions, but rather presents situations that speak to the search. The piece, anything but kitchen-sink drama, is a totally moving experience.

I was waiting for the lights to dim so the performers could set themselves on stage before I noticed they had been there the entire time, unmoving, cloaked—no, draped!—in white gauze, attached to another performer, a soprano floating in the back corner. The performers-as-set is beautifully disturbing—a giant, perfect cobweb. The soprano's voice fills the room as the performers birth themselves from her. Opposite, the narrator, cloaked in black, separates herself from another performer in red. Once both tasks are accomplished, the lights dim, and the real show begins—dance pieces interspersed with storytelling and spoken word by the narrator and the haunting voice of the soprano. The scenes center around a social worker's interviewees, three troubled souls who feel "E-motions" that are manifested through the dancers, whose strong, graceful bodies remind me how beautiful the human body is.

The best scene is that of the dancer who portrays a child with an alcoholic father. Dressed in a blue tutu, attached to a chair, she dances with the chair as the narrator communicates the story. The dancer is gifted and the scene feels more specific than the others, which are generalized and ask the audience to assume more.

Body Maps is wonderful except for the television. Why do companies, even those comprised of dancers who perform on a symbolic, ethereal plane in a world of E-motion, insist on using a TV., which is distracting and whose presence is not justified in any way? We never forget it is a television and the actors never react to it in a way that communicates to the audience why it is there, detracting from their otherwise oh-so-admirable work.
RED WHITE BLACK & BLUE
by Joanne Joseph
Julie Polk is a classical actor who can translate massively powerful emotional work into contemporary idioms, without pretense, falsity, or any other detrimental aspects. This is a rarity and a gift to audiences.

I will not give away the whole story line of her one person show Red White Black & Blue, so as not to diminish in any way the impact it has. The "set" at the Collective Unconscious Theatre consists only of a high-placed window; and on stage is Polk, one chair, and Tom Gavin, with guitar and other smaller items which make musical under-scorings. I sometimes think The Spoken Word should be left alone—the guitar strumming caused us to lose some text at times, but at other times did enhance the moods.

The window, I surmise, is significant, as it looks down on the scene of a brutal event involving Jessie Howard, a 74-year-old black man who is a WW II veteran, and two young punks, on the Fourth of July. Polk, of course, with voice and body is fully the old man and the young boys.

Interwoven with the above-mentioned event on America's most patriotic holiday is the family strife concerning a drug addict brother, and two parents—a scornful mother and an apparently unloving father. Polk's persona attempts to achieve a family-togetherness holiday, which fails completely. She, the only one on stage, amazingly is all the other people at home too, as well as on the street beneath the window.

Naomi Barr has directed the proceedings tightly. Red White Black & Blue is a deeply moving reflection on levels of violence, macro and micro, horrendous and heart-rending. It deserves to be seen by larger audiences.
OF (H)AIR, HUGS, AND HOSPITALS
by Tim Cusack
D. Faith Howard is a very good student—at least if her choreography in Of h(air), hugs, and hospitals is any indication. A recent graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts’ dance program, Howard was obviously paying attention in composition and technique class. In fact much of this material was developed at school. It’s also clear that she is committed to using dance to say something about her experiences in the world. Her challenge now, it seems, is to take the tools she’s acquired and build her own unique structures in which to say them. From the evidence on display she’s not quite there yet, but one gets the feeling that once she works through her academic influences, she has the potential to emerge as a distinctive choreographic voice.

"My Father," for example, very much feels like an experiment in using text, rather than a fully constructed portrait gallery of her dancers’ fathers and their relationships with their athletic daughters. The spoken text suggests that the state of intergenerational understanding is quite high: the only hint at conflict comes when one woman says that she and her father compete to see who can use bigger words in conversation. Otherwise, their fathers lovingly carry them to bed and wish for more children just like them. Wearing men’s dress shirts and ties over black spandex, the paternal women tap their fingers on imaginary watches, impatiently slice the air with their arms and legs as if cutting through the business world undergrowth., and point up the ladder of success. Someone’s got to foot the bills (pun intended) for their daughters’ expensive artistic training. Dancing to Ani DiFranco’s "Carry You Around," the daddies exchange their business-world isolation for the chance to do just that. The piece ends too quickly, though, for any of these ideas to fully mature, not to mention allowing for the possibility that being the provider may at times be an unbearable burden.

In "Air Travel," Howard builds herself a metaphoric airplane to soar into a dance career. The last image is simple and gorgeous: a lone woman seemingly floating above a crowd of dancers. The rest of the piece is busy with movement, but what specifically it has to say about this particular woman’s opportunities, ambitions and fears for her adulthood remains ambiguous. She’s taken her first small steps; now she needs a giant leap.