FringeNYC 16: Immaculate Degeneration

I hate the idea that one person shows, or one woman shows in particular, are in need of any sort of special pleading, but I find that is so often the case. I like seeing people tell their stories and the stories of others, lives as led and adventures taken and embarked upon, both fictional and true, hilarious and heart-rending and all stops in between. And it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog, that the lives of American teenage girls are of endless interest to this particular critic.

Pamela Sabaugh's Immaculate Degeneration hit me on a lot of those levels. I share with her a suburban/urban punk rock girlhood (mine in NYC, hers in Detroit), the need for escape and the wanting of better things common to most artists of all stripes.  The great thing that distinguishes Sabaugh's journey to independence in these United States as an artist, is her partial blindness, caused by a congenital disorder (juvenile macular degeneration) which presented itself in Junior High. She talks about how the onset of blindness interfered with her social life, her schoolwork, and her badass-ery. And most movingly, about how it limited her freedom, about growing up in the motor city unable to drive. 

Sabaugh's story, like all deeply personal stories worth telling, is bigger than herself. She tells about growing up in a subdivision in which pedestrians are viewed with suspicion. About a decaying city in thrall to the almighty automobile, in the epicenter of the public transportation-free rust belt. Her visual impairment made her dependent on others in a way that was both humiliating and sometimes dangerous (having a friend wander off with a guitarist at a local rock fest when the bus never shows). For her, moving to NYC meant not only artistic freedom, but having a true personal autonomy. She has a song about the MTA that actually made me cry. Her songs and voice are are lovely. I was really hoping there would be a CD in the press kit as I would have immediately loaded them onto my ipod.

Mostly, this is a joyful piece of work. Sabaugh is a delightful person to spend 90 minutes with, and in the spirit of full journalistic disclosure, I have to say that I do know Pamela, and her director/husband Fred Backus has long been a friend and a collaborator on various projects throughout the years. I'm not certain if Fred has directed before, but Immaculate Degeneration hits that really difficult balance of being both really tight (there's nothing I would cut, and I almost never say that, friends or not), yet being loose and casual enough that you feel a part of the event in a really nice way.

Pamela has had a lot of challenges, but for my money, her considerable gifts, both personal and artistic have enabled her to embrace them and allow them to inform but not define who she as as both a person and an artist. A very difficult balancing act, which it was my pleasure to watch her not only achieve, but transcend, with grace.

Immaculate Degeneration (click for tickets)

Woodward Avenue Productions

Writer: Pamela Sabaugh
Director: Fred Backus
The Huron Club, 15 Vandam St.
Remaining Performances: Tue 14 @ 4pm, Sat 18 @ 1:45,  Sun 19 @ 7pm,  Wed 22 @ 4:30

FringeNYC 16

You know how when you get together with your siblings or cousins you can say super disparaging things about your grandpa or aunt or mom? But how if some person not in your family said awful things about your grandpa or aunt or mom you'd be really, really mad? Yeah. That basically sums up my feelings about criticism of FringeNYC in a nutshell. Unless you were in certain rooms round about 1998 or 1999, I don't want to hear about it. However, if you were, let it fly!

The 16th edition of the New York International Fringe Festival begins tonight, something that makes me feel shockingly old. This also marks the first festival since the very first in which I am a complete civilian. I haven't been on the festival staff since 2003 (nine years!). For better or worse, I did all my mourning for the early years of the festival in slow motion while I was still involved with it so, honestly, what I mostly feel is relief.

Let me explain.

A number of years ago I attended a book event at which art and performance luminaries of the 70s and 80s spoke about the downtown art scene back then, and about the state of the current art and performance scene. I remember Bogosian speaking and a few others, and person after person went on and on about how much more creative, what a better sense of community, how exciting it all was compared the scene now. Needless to say, I was furious.

Then the sainted Michael Musto got to the podium. The very first thing he did was blast (nicely) all the previous speakers for their criticism of the current young artists. He said (and I'm paraphrasing wildly - this is from my memory of an event like seven years ago), "It seemed so great back then because we were so young! Of course everything seemed so much better, we're all old and cynical now." Bless him!

I'm old enough that those (now curmudgeonly) 70s and 80s artists were a part of what my idea of the world of art was like. Downtown lofts and punk rock and nightclubs (the kind without all that table service nonsense) and galleries in Soho. I read the Voice (back when you had to pay for the privilege) and Interview (when Andy was still alive). I smoked cigarettes in the East Village, I saw bands play at CBGB and The Ritz. I wrote short stories about paranoid, displaced Lizard People living in New York. I became an actor. I drew pictures. I dreamed of Cafe Cino. In the 90s I interned at Circle Rep, Lanford Wilson's company and I became a playwright. That led me to the Present Company and FringeNYC.

You'll likely be reading lots about the early days of FringeNYC in my memoirs one day so I'll keep it short. We were so young. We worked so hard. It was messy and dirty and punk rock. We had the best time and it was hell. It was equal parts magic and exhaustion. We were very, very young. And I want to be very clear about one thing: FringeNYC gave me my life. I can't even imagine what my life would look like now without it and the downtown theater scene of the late 90s, because my life would look 100% different.

So, I look at Fringe NYC now and it looks like an institution. I was a participant last year and there are a lot of rules. I look at the kids working there and all I can think is, "my god it looks dull" and "poor things, they'll never know the fun and horror of what we had". And then I realize that I'm just old. Nothing is new to me and these young people need to find their own way as I did. And their community seems a little invisible to me because I'm not a part of it, and I'm not welcome because I'm not in the trenches. I can keep my memories of the festival's gritty, punk rock past intact. The festival as it now stands may not be my festival, but that's okay. It's theirs. I'm sure I'll be reading some of their blog posts 20 years down the road, writing about how very young they were in 2012.

The New York International Fringe Festival begins today. I will be covering it from the depths of my cold, black heart. Check back frequently.

Miss Saturn!

My delightful inamorato is posting a series of pieces on modern vaudevillians he has featured on the stage of his American Vaudeville Theatre in honor of its 15th anniversary and the attendant FringeNYC show celebrating this occasion.

Today's post is all about the lovely Miss Saturn, so I decided to pull a sketch I did a few years ago out of the archives.

FringeNYC: Year 15 :::faints:::

Though I haven't yet enacted my scheme to teach a Learning Annex class on "How To Get Accepted By FringeNYC"*, I still react with great excitement and anticipation when the applications are posted to the Fringe NYC website. So, they're here. They are due, as always, on St. Valentine's Day.

Sometime in the near future, I will likely be writing something long and epic about the wonderful and sometimes maligned Festival, possibly somewhere else, so I wil keep my remarks here to a minimum. FringeNYC is a monster and a wonder. It changed things, not least of all me. Many of the complaints seem inexplicable and over-privileged to me. And I have no interest in arguing about that here. If you don't like it, stay at home and run yer own damn festival.

Everyone else, apply if you want. See theater. That's all.

*I'm kidding. I'm always willing to proffer general advice but (and I can't say this strongly enough), you cannot game the system. I will not help you "get into FringeNYC". The end.

(the above is the postcard from my first FringeNYC show in 2000. Illustration by me)

FringeNYC 14: Too Late, Too Late!

I've caught a couple of shows on their final performances, so unhappy readers, you missed out. But I still wanted to get my two cents in, so hence, this post.

It's really not of Trick Boxing's doing that the pre-show turned into an inadvertent reunion of friends from Fringes past (and present), but I must thank them for it all the same. It felt like 1999 all over again out there in the audience.

The show itself is both as sweet and ephemeral as spun sugar. The story is that ancient boxing chestnut: poor boy, smooth talking manager, wicked gambler, sweet girl. In other words, seen it a hundred times before, nothing special. What elevated the show a bit above the fray was the dancing, which was, in a word, glorious. Brian Sostek plays all the male characters and morphs between them seemingly effortlessly (note: it's pretty much a rule of thumb in theater, that whenever one says something is done "effortlessly", something like a hundred hours of rehearsal and countless more of experience has made it seem so). He also acts as puppeteer and ring announcer for all the bouts. But back to the dancing. Both Sostek and Megan McClellan (who plays the girl), dance beautifully, and with joy. He has that old fashioned, low to the ground grace that is more than rare in this selfish show boat-y age. What I mean is, they both let each other shine, and thus achieve something like grace. The story is really just an excuse for the performers to show off their skills. As considerable as those skills are, this particular reviewer cannot exist on a diet of ice cream sundaes, and would love to see these two marrying their talents to a piece with maybe a shade more originality.

Trick Boxing
Sossy Mechanics
Writer: Megan McClellan and Brian Sostek
Director: Megan McClellan and Brian Sostek
Choreographer: Megan McClellan and Brian Sostek

As I was leaving the theater after the final performance of Butterfly, Butterfly, Kill, Kill, Kill! last week, two women behind me were saying how they couldn't imagine "getting" the show without having first seen the film on which it was based. I've never seen Seijun Suzuki's 1967 film Branded To Kill (but now I really, really want to!), but I'm pretty conversant in all the other influences at play, so I feel pretty okay about reviewing it. Apparently, Suzuki was hired to make a typical Yakuza crime film, but steeped in Pop, incipient psychedelia, and nouvelle vague, he made a film the studio called incomprehensible.

I liked pretty much everything about Depth Charge's production, so I'm once again in danger of turning this into a listicle. Oh, hell. I have places to be and art to create, so a semi-listicle it will be:

1. It felt like old fashioned Fringe Festival Fun. I mean that in the best way possible. Finally, a show that is creative and smart and interestingly executed. I salute you, Depth Charge! You are a prime example of FringeNYC's raison d'etre.

2. Godard started deconstructing the gangster movie and film noir 50 years ago with Á Bout de Souffle (Breathless), but his most iconic (and for my money, brilliant) riff on the gangster motif was Band Á Part. I was happy to see the reenactment of the famous dance scene from that film on stage. I also riffed on it in my 2002 FringeNYC show, Die Like A Lady.

3. Having seen Kabuki in Tokyo, it was delightful to see those influences as well. The white face, the over the top presentational acting.

4. So creatively staged, from top to bottom. Deeply filmic in a way I haven't seen before. Which, considering the movie drenched influences of half the people I know making theater right now, is saying a lot. The violence, in particular, took film editing into consideration in a way that felt very very fresh. Whenever anybody was shot, the gun was never pointed at them. It was just like editing and looked great. They thought about everything and didn't fall into any boring defaults.

5. The music was live. I repeat the music was live. Well, most of it. Live stand up bass and drums and the rest was mixed live.

6. Some of the video elements were projected onto the backdrop by a woman with an 8mm home movie projector. I had nearly forgotten what a different feel movies have from digital. Just hearing the projector was cool and retro and evocative.

7. I'm not saying every moment worked, or was pristine, but really, how could it be and who wants it to be? It was messy and real and alive.

8. They stole from everybody and wore their influences proudly on their sleeves creating something that felt new, something I haven't seen in a while, as I've seen a freaking lot. Butterfly, Butterfly is overambitious and messy and super smart. Like Godard, the show isn't about it's plot, it's mostly about it's influences. Which, in our media steeped age is as valid a subject as anything else.

Butterfly, Butterfly, Kill Kill Kill!
Depth Charge
Writer: Patrick Harrison, Music by Dave Harrington
Director: Patrick Harrison
Choreographer: Adam Scott Mazer & Ian Picco

FringeNYC 14: The Great Galvani

The Players Loft, perched two flights above MacDougal Street is neither large or glamorous. But there's something about the sight of a lovely, corseted, well-coiffed, Victorian bearded lady that makes one think of gaslight through a 19th century fog. Or is it just me? I want to draw her, but foolishly didn't dredge up my pad and pencil in time.

The Great Galvani begins with a brief prologue from the bearded-lady (all gaff, but looking terrific), before the main event. Which is a monologue delivered by actor H.B Ward full of shabby wonderment and real pathos. Ward is a terrific actor (he I did draw) who paints word pictures in one's head with far more skill than many theater artists and lord knows dime museums do with actual three dimensional supposed wonders. Feegee mermaids and electric experiments on the nervous systems of frogs and probably most importantly, fathers and sons. The payoff at the end is worthy of it's skilled prelude, indeed, even if one is less enchanted with clockwork marvels than this reviewer happens to be, I promise you.

The Great Galvani
The Magpies
Writer: Shawn Reddy
Director: Shawn Reddy
The Players Loft, 115 MacDougal Street
remaining performances: Sat 28 @ 7 & Sun 29 @ NOON

(Photo: Jeremy Sher)

FringeNYC 14: The Hurricane Katrina Comedy Festival

My first year as a true FringeNYC civilian, my first year reviewing shows without it being a complete conflict of interest, has been a delightful experience. There's so much theater here: some of it has been beautiful or inspiring or funny, some has made me angry or bored, but, really, that's the nature of this particular many tentacled Kraken.

I saw The Hurricane Katrina Comedy Festival last Wednesday, then got distracted by some plumbing problems and an asthma attack and more show seeing and finally some quality boyfriend time, so I didn't get around to writing it up til now. Which is a little inexcusable, but whatever. The worst thing about this show is the title as it is terribly misleading. Both my delightful escort and I were under the impression that it might be some sort of stand up thing (possibly) with comedians from New Orleans. Which wouldn't much appeal to me. But I heard from some of my Mysterious Inside Sources that it was both very, very good, and poorly titled. Right on both counts.

What the show actually is, is a meticulously constructed oral history of the hurricane and the aftermath as told by five residents of New Orleans. The play is as simple as can be. Five actors sit on chairs. They each tell their own first person account of what happened to them during the storm, with the other actors occasionally stepping in to play other participants in that person's tale. That's it. The stories are true. The stories are riveting. The stories are funny. The stories are completely heartbreaking.

Back in 2004, when In the Shadow of No Towers came out, I saw Art Spiegelman speak at The New School. One of the things he talked about was how he never understood why as things in Europe got worse and worse people stayed. Why not flee? He said he finally understood it after 9/11, when he saw inklings of apocalypse in his own city. This was his home, and he didn't even think of leaving. You don't think it's going to get that bad. This is essentially the position of most of the five people whose stories we hear in this piece. This is their home. Why should they leave? Their homes had withstood hurricane after hurricane, even that really bad one.

One of the most ignored economic principles is that past performance is a bad way to gage future performance, and this applies to hurricanes as well. We all know what happened and saw it on TV. The levees broke and the city of New Orleans was flooded. The disaster response was abysmal. For that, and for hiding in a bunker or whatever after and during 9-11 may be the two things that make me say in regards to out wretched former president, "God damn him to hell, and why didn't Laura smother him with a pillow when she had a chance."

The five actors give extraordinary, mature performances. Any young actor who wants to see how it's done should see Hurricane Katrina for that alone. But the stories themselves are the real draw. There are two performances left, go just go. I haven't heard or seen much about this show in the press, but just go.

The Hurricane Katrina Comedy Festival
Batture Productions
Writer: Rob Florence
Director: Dann Fink
Soho Playhouse, 15 Vandam Street
remaining performances: Wed 25 @ 3 & Sun 29 @ 4:15

As an added bonus:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Timeline
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

I'm Just Really Fucking Over It

I've been awfully happy recently, so maybe I've gone a little soft. And before that I was REALLY unhappy, and sort of convinced I was a horrible person, so maybe that made me go all domesticated, too. So I feel as if I've been letting things slide here and there in a way I really shouldn't. I'm talking specifically about my review of Ghost of Dracula last week. The show is pretty inconsequential, and not particularly skilled, so I was really soft on it. Which is fine. Making any theater is really difficult. But there's one thing that's been really nagging at me, so I felt I had to bring it up.

First of all, just to get it out of the way, I'm a bitch. Do you know how I know this? Because I'm informed of it, on average, two to seven times a week. I walk down the streets of Manhattan and I ride the subway and occasionally I get on buses. If there is even the tiniest ray of sunshine I will have my sunglasses on. If I am sitting, in public, I will most likely be reading a book. Most of the time I have earphones in my ears. I keep a stony cold look on my face. But it does no fucking good. I cannot go out in public without some creep intruding into my personal space bubble and talking to me and demanding that I talk to him. I never fucking do, so I am called a bitch. Like, all the time. I hardly even notice it. Occasionally, I am called a slut or a whore for refusing to talk to these assholes. Which, on top of being evil, makes no fucking sense. Even according to their warped thinking, how does refusing to talk to strange men make me a slut? But that's not the point, and that brings me to what I wanted to bring up about Ghost of Dracula.

Twice in the show Mina is called a stupid slut by her ex-boyfriend Van Helsing, which made me want to aim a flame thrower at the stage. There was no context to it, and Mina's only response was to look angry and embarrassed and shut up, just as Van Helsing wanted and the show continued. Now, look. The following are the only reasons anyone calls a woman a stupid slut:

1. To shut her up.
2. To discredit what she's saying or doing
3. To humiliate her.
   

That's it. That's why the random assholes on the street call me a slut all the time. To discredit and humiliate me. And, to preclude this from popping up in the comments (in general, my commenters are lovely, but one never knows what under bridge dwellers will pop up), if anyone asks "Why do we have to be so politically correct all the time?" my answer will be: Are you fucking kidding me? What is your definition of "politically correct"? A world where the continuous harassment of 50% of the world's population isn't tacitly endorsed? Because, like, that's what we're talking about. Got it? Or should I use smaller words. Think for two seconds: why is calling a woman a "stupid slut" funny in and of itself? People in the theater laughed, not because it was funny, per se, but because at that moment Van Helsing was the biggest bully in the fucking schoolyard, and by laughing they were demonstrating allegiance with the center of power. It couldn't be surprise, because women get called horrible humiliating things all the time. On the street, in print, everywhere. It's not new or transgressive in any kind of interesting way if it's devoid of context and point. It's just ugly and backwards looking and uncreative and depressing. And if you think it's funny you are a total fucking asshole.

That's it.

FringeNYC 14: Bagabones

I was sitting watching Bagabones last night with my delightful escort, and not hugely enjoying it. Jonathan Nosan is a contortionist by trade, and his piece needs a lot of shaping and structure. As some of you might be aware, I am a fiend for dramatic structure, and as I say over and over until I'm blue in the face (speaking of which, more on that later), structure has nothing to do with plot. Structure, if anything, frees one from narrative. It's more musical, about a feeling of shape. Instead of having arcs, the show pretty much existed, in terms of energy and content, along one straight line.

I love physical work. I love wordless work. Over the years, I've seen and enjoyed lots of experimental movement and dance. But I felt as if there was nothing here for me to latch onto. I found the sound design to be loud and headache inducing, but I may in fact be part puppy and do have a particularly hard time with the shrill and the loud and the sudden. I thought it looked nice at the beginning, with Nosan wearing a suit and fedora, with a harsh, directional white special. But the whole show was lit like this, and I found it tiring looking at a show that dark for an hour. There was a segment where he seemed to be some sort of yogi which ended in a really neat effect in which it looked like he was floating in the air in a lotus pose. But prior to this, I pretty much thought I was watching him do his yoga practice. Nosan is very, very strong and has great control of his body, but this alone does not make a compelling show.

At the end of the show, Nosan breaks a vase, releasing a dramatic looking puff of smoke. I smelled talc. Look - I'm asthmatic and really, really don't deal well with particulates. I considered running for the door, but it would have been really disruptive and the show was clearly over, so I waited out the curtain call. It triggered a minor attack which, honestly, sucked. Like a moron, I didn't have my inhaler with me. So, yeah. A warning of some sort would have been nice. That's all.

BAGABONES
created by Jonathan Nosan
The First Floor Theatre@ LaMaMa, 74A East 4th Street
remaining performances: Sun 22 @ 6 & Thu 26 @ 6

FringeNYC 14: The Headscarf and the Angry Bitch and The Altoona Dada Society Presents The Velvet Gentleman

The Altoona Dada Society Presents The Velvet Gentleman is one of those unfortunate shows that is so rife with possibilities and missed opportunities one feels like shaking it. First a word about dada. This anti-art movement sprung from the death, ugliness and violence of World War I. It was abstract and anarchistic. Nothing, and I mean nothing in this particular production has anything to do with Dada. Nothing.

The Velvet Gentleman is a play within a play being presented by the titular Altoona Dada Society of Altoona, PA. Now, there are a lot of ways they could go with this. The Velvet Gentleman is a biography of Erik Satie, a composer strange enough that people are still unsure whether he was brilliant and ahead of his time, or simply mad. Scenes of Satie's life are interrupted by the members of the ADS (Altoona Dada Society) as they bicker amongst themselves, and explain to the audience all the internal conflicts surrounding the dismissal of their anti-artistic director. All is told in a pretty ordinary linear fashion. Which is not necessarily a terrible thing, but the play feels underwritten. The behind the scene story doesn't really go anywhere and feels repetitious. We don't get quite enough of Satie or his music. There are parts of the show that had great potential, but the execution was a little sloppy and poorly directed. The actors all spoke their lines as if they had quotation marks around them which got increasingly tiresome as the show went on.

Dada was meant to be a desecration in the face of an increasingly violent and meaningless world. There are a lot of things that could be done with the material they already have, but they would need a lot more spontaneity and chaos to do all their references any sort of justice.

The Altoona Dada Society Presents The Velvet Gentleman
PlaylabNYC
Writer: Jon Steinhagen
Director: Kevin P. Hale
The Studio@Cherry Lane Theater, 38 Commerce Street
remaining performances: Wed 25 @ 2 & Thu 26 @ 9:15


Zehra Fazal's Zed Headscarf is a completely delightful creation and Headscarf and the Angry Bitch is a smart entertaining show that is tailor made for the fringe festivals of the world. Zed Headscarf is a chirpy, young Pakistani-American (dubbed the "Muslim Weird Al") who is touring Islamic Community Centers, educating the American public on Islam. After seeing dozens of one person shows over the years, I've come to realize that pretty much only one thing counts, everything else is gravy: that the performer is the sort of person one would be happy to watch and listen to for an hour. Fazal has this quality in spades.

Her show is divided up into chapters in which she explains various aspects of Islam and Muslim culture to us. As the piece goes on, her self revelations about sex, dating, family and religion become deeper and more transgressive and funnier and funnier. She also sings funny song parodies about things like losing her virginity on Ramadan and about dating a blonde girls - just like her ex-boyfriend. The show is also a meditation on otherness within American culture which, it might be argued, is the whole story of American culture and something that some people seem to have forgotten. It's also about being first generation American born, about awkwardly straddling two cultures, about being made to feel uncomfortable with your body, about trying to reconcile opposing parts of oneself. And it's all very, very funny.

Note: it seems to be selling out like crazy so get your tix in advance.

Headscarf and the Angry Bitch
Writer: Zehra Fazal
The Studio@Cherry Lane Theater, 38 Commerce Street
remaining performances: Wed 18 @ 8:15 & Fri 20 @ 3:45

FringeNYC 14: PigPen Presents: The Nightmare Story

I may not want to smooch this delightful (45 MINUTE!) show by PigPen Theatre, but I may want to adopt it. From the moment you enter The Club at LaMaMa you pretty much know you're going to have a nice time. The members of the cast are playing (something like) Ukrainian folk music on a guitar, accordion, fiddle, banjo and a drum made out of a wooden box. They joke around with each other, their door person and the audience in the most laid back and charming way possible. They are relaxed on stage in the way only the most confident of performers can manage. And they play very, very well. And there is table service in the venue, so you can have a drink.

The show itself is a made up Ukrainian folk tale told in song and puppets and story telling and theater. It weaves tales within tales and is incredibly funny and creepy and disturbing and true, like all the best fairy tales. A young boy's mother is dying from the dread Nightmare Disease and must travel to find the flower that will save her. The journey is full of monsters and death. And is hilarious and loose and genuine. The five young men who perform the piece seem to hardly break a sweat as they accomplish something that is so difficult to do, I've almost never seen it done right. Take a fairy tale, make it culturally specific (there were a couple of lines in Russian and my Russian speaking theater-going companion said they were funny, too), add songs, add several different kinds of puppetry, make it very, very funny, do it on a shoe-string, make it look beautiful.

PigPen Presents: The Nightmare Story
Writer: Alex Falberg, Arya Shahi, Ben Ferguson, Curtis Gillen, Daniel Weschler, Matt Nuernberger, Ryan Melia
The Club@LaMaMa, 74A East 4th Street
remaining performances: Wed 18 @ 9, Fri 20 @ 4:45, Sat 21 @ 7

FringeNYC 14: Picking Palin, Shine: A Burlesque Musical and The Ghost of Dracula

I tagged along to see Picking Palin as the date of my always charming constant escort as I was pretty sure it was Not My Thing, and thus it wasn't on my list of shows to see. Okay. I was right. It isn't My Thing, but the Thing They Do is very well done. Playwright Stephen Padilla's one act shows the behind the scenes machinations that led to the picking of Sarah Palin as the GOP vice-presidential candidate. Just typing that name makes my skin crawl as I've been participating in my own, personal Sarah Palin media blackout since the election ended. I don't post or comment on clips or articles about her on facebook. I don't mention her (until now) on my blog. It bugs me when people post about her, and then shout "Why won't she just go away?!", because I feel like responding, "Stop posting about her! THAT's why!". That outburst out of the way, back to my review. Picking Palin is well acted and well directed. It's nice to see grown up actors playing grown up characters on a FringeNYC stage. It's smartly written, with the more moderate Republican characters make useful points, which should be of no surprise to anyone who read Peggy Noonan or Kathleen Parker during the past election season, or who witnessed Christopher Buckley's volte face. For me, it did lack some stakes and suspense. I mean, we all know how it's going to end, and the final decision was made by someone off stage (McCain), so it felt a little inert to me. But, again, it is not My Thing (it was a little light on robots and talking animals).

Picking Palin
written and directed by Stephen Pedilla
The Connolly Theater, 220 East 4th Street
remaining performances: Wed 18 @ 1:30, Sat 21 @ 9:45, Wed 25 @ 9:30, Sat 28 @ NOON

Shine, which subtitles itself a "a burlesque musical" is the sort of FringeNYC offering that always gives me pause. It appears to be slick enough and expensive enough that I inevitably wonder, "Why here?". The piece was conceived by and around the talents of singer, Cass King, and her songwriter partner, John Woods, who have dubbed themselves "The Wet Spots". The songs are well-written, but their book is negligible. The burlesque musical has a proud tradition in American musical theater, as two of the greatest of all American theatrical works, Gypsy and Cabaret, are among their number. But I'm awfully confused by what I saw on the stage of the lovely Ellen Stewart Theatre at LaMaMa the other night. The story is that hoariest of old chestnuts: Let's put on a show to raise the funds to save _____! In this case a burlesque house. As I stated above, the book is a mess. It introduces an ingenue couple and then does nearly nothing with them. The female ingenue is introduced as a gender studies major who is writing her thesis on burlesque, a point that is completely dropped after its initial introduction. There is also a subplot about a larger sized singer whom the money bags who is producing the theater-saving show doesn't want in the lead. This is (rightly) painted as narrow and wrong, but the thing is: she's not the lead of Shine either, so the protests felt a little hollow to me. There is also a lot of talk about the downtown versus uptown sensibility which was a little tough for me to swallow as the whole show seemed pure uptown to me from tip to tail. There were some very, very good dancers on that stage, and I would have liked to see them do a little more. It felt weirdly safe and staid and unsexy. The upshot is, they really need a lot of help with the book. Their note in the program is delightful, and their intentions are good: but the show they talk about is not apparent on stage.

SHINE: A Burlesque Musical
The Wet Spots
Writer: Cass King, John Woods (The Wet Spots) and Sam Dulmage
Director: Roger Benington
The Ellen Stewart Theatre @LaMaMa, 66-68 East 4th Street
remaining performances: Mon 23 @ 9:45, Thu 26 @ 2, Sat 28 @ 2

Oh, Ghost of Dracula. Everyone involved in it is so very, very obviously young. I feel like I'm an awful curmudgeon saying anything awful about them. Their show is shouty, underbaked and there is a series of slide projections of questionable taste. They indulge in the kind of racial humor that Dave Chappelle gets away with beautifully, but is much more problematic when being attempted by a bunch of white recent college grads. The cast, and the audience plants who are later revealed to be cast, look like they're having fun. Is it any good? Well, no. It's dreadful. But, as I said, they are so very, very young.

Ghost of Dracula
Colby Day Productions
Writer: Kenneth Molloy, based on characters created by Bram Stoker
Director: Daniel Johnsen
Connelly Theater, 220 East 4th Street
remaining performances: Wed 18 @ 10:45, Tue 24 @ 8:30, Sun 29 @ 2

(photo: pictured: Cass King Photographer: Frank Roberts)

FringeNYC 14: The Battle of Spanktown

The aforementioned Battle of Spanktown combines so many disparate elements, it shouldn't possibly work. It is a piece of Revolutionary War history, relating how a dispute betwixt a Mole and a Badger incites a series of events involving a young Hobbeldehoy who embarks on a classic Fool's journey encountering many Wonders and Adventures, including a dread Kobold and the freeing of the Winter Queen from the Nefarious Red Coats only to find himself assisting General George Washington himself in the Great War of Independence.

In other words, it is a delightful 18th century picaresque (a literary style which may be characterized as "one damn thing after another"). There are animals who are clearly important members of Spanktown society. There are fairy tale elements that are done extraordinarily well. In fool's stories, a younger son, usually poor, often considered stupid or foolish in some way, leaves home in search of a fortune and gets it after a series of adventures. Puss in Boots is the most famous of the genre. Here the Hobbeldehoy fills this function to a tee. The writer knows his tales.

Of course, the success of any theatrical enterprise is more in the how than the what. And the execution here is delightful. Jeffrey Pfeiffer's script is a wondrous thing. When one hears the word pastiche, one usually thinks of something derivative. But here, the odd disparate elements form a delightful and unique whole. Big kudos are due to Heidi Handelsman for her direction. The performances are all funny and distinct. The casting is marvelous, some of the actors looking as if they have stepped right out of the pages of Punch. The set pieces and costumes are simple and functional, look properly period without being too much. I don't think anything cost very much either, but clearly a great deal of thought went into all of it. Which is far more important than deep pockets in a fringe production.

Their website is worth a visit (or two). Included is a timeline of events in Spanktown's history. I was particularly glad to learn the about the (heretofore under-reported) importance of robots in the War of Independence. And I look forward to collecting my Animal Heroes of the Revolutionary War commemorative stamp series.

The Battle of Spanktown
Writer: Jeffrey Pfeiffer
Director: Heidi Handelsman
Dixon Place, 161 Chrystie Street
remaining performances: Mon 16 @2, Sun 22 @ 12, Wed 25 @ 10, Fri 27 @ 10:45


(Illustration: Jason Stefanik via battleofspanktown.com)

FringeNYC 14: The First Weekend

So, it's late(ish) Sunday night and the first weekend of the festival is over and done. I saw seven shows over the first three days, so I will once again be bringing you a listical of festival related thoughts, because I am too very, very sleepy to write a proper posting. Actual write ups of shows will follow in subsequent posts.

1. As much as anything, FringeNYC is about variety. Seeing one show you don't like is statistically negligible. If you care about things such as theater and have the time, cash or access: see lots. It does interesting things to your head. I was less than ecstatic about one or two of the first shows I watched. Than saw one I adored. I want to take this show home with me and smooch it (sorry, Trav! This is metaphor smooching.). Then I saw some more. Some were wonderful. Some were less than wonderful. But the resulting commingled effect of watching all these various productions was in making me want to write. I want to say it's inspiring, and I guess that's what I mean, but the word doesn't feel exactly right. It's a more subtle affect. More like osmosis. Like just being near all this theater causes parthenogenesis to naturally occur. The thing being gestated being a play. Or something.

2. I have run into at least one person I know at every show I have attended so far, which is delightful.

3. The shows, over all, are far too long. An hour is the ideal length for a festival show (in fact, many festivals insist upon it). 90 minutes on the outside. Any longer, you better earn it. Case in point: most people I know will see anything if it is 45 minutes long. Something an hour forty will need some sort of vetting.

4. This is my tribute to [name redacted]: the temperatures inside all the theaters I have thus far attended have been perfectly comfortable (though maybe The New School was on the cold side. But I'm always freezing so I'm not to be trusted and won't hold it against either them or FringeNYC).

5. Running into the wondrous and magical Martin Denton at your very first show of the festival means you will have a lucky and enjoyable theater year. Look! I just invented a new superstition!

6. I prefer watching messy and over-reaching to safe and well made.

7. All undergraduate theater programs are not created equal.

8. I'm not sorry I saw any of the seven shows I saw.

9. Puppets and fairy tales and murder will always make me really happy. Likewise anthropomorphized animals. I am seven.

10. I've been swimming in these downtown theatrical waters for a very long time now, and have been involved in some way or another with this particular festival for 13 years. The New York International Fringe Festival is a behemoth. It is of massive scope. It is not a boutique industry. That's kind of its reason for being. There are a number of small, more narrowly focused festivals presented by other entities throughout the year. And don't get me wrong, many (actually, most) of them are absolutely wonderful. But FringeNYC is a monster with all the attendant pluses and minuses that go along with being monstrous. Really, if one finds oneself in the Kraken's wake, there's little one can do but go along and enjoy being entangled in its tentacles.



(Picture credits: I lifted the thoroughly delightful illustrations that bedeck this post from the informative and beautifully designed website of the smoochable show, The Battle of Spanktown (running through August 27 at Dixon Place). Metaphor smooches! Illustrations by Jason Stefanik)

FringeNYC 14 Begins

The 14th edition of my sometimes beloved, my sometimes maddening, FringeNYC begins today with its usual headspinning array of theatrical confections. I wrote a couple of years ago about the wonder of being just a simple audience member. Well. In the spirit of full disclosure, that was a little disingenuous. I sat on the adjudication panel (i.e. the panel of people who make the selection decisions) for seven years, from 2003 through 2009, so I wasn't precisely a civilian. This year, however, I will be (more or less).

Festival reportage will likely take up lots of space here throughout the next couple of weeks, as I intend to see and then subsequently think and write about lots and lots of theater. If there is something you think a person of my particular interests (visual arts/spectacle, fairy tales, dance, really fucking good writing, etc.) might enjoy, please contact me via facebook and let me know.

So, off I go into the fray. But, seriously? All this show seeing is easy-peasy. Running the festival is hard. So if you're out there, and come face to face with a box office person or somebody on staff: be nice. Shows start on time. Don't be late. Be polite, and if a show is sold out- so be it. Don't make a fuss. Just go see something else (there are nearly 200 offerings) or get a margarita or something. And if you're flat broke? Volunteer and get free tickets for working a shift. The Volunteer Coordinator is named Taty (pronounced Tatchie)and she's just lovely. Say "Hi" for me, and tell her I sent you. You won't regret it, I promise.

Now, tear your precious eyeballs away from your computers and go see some art!

P.S. My ever charming inamorato, Trav S.D., has some excellent advice for all the critics who are rubbing their hands in excitement as they prepare to review the temperature of the theater, and complain that a puppet show from Montreal* that arrived in the country, like, yesterday, lacks the technical precision of a show that has a week to tech. I endorse every word in his posting. For example: due to circumstances beyond our (or the festival's) control, when I directed Antarctica in the 2007 Fringe(NYC), we had no tech rehearsal whatsoever. So, yeah, read it and take it to heart.

The New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC)
August 13-29
FringeCENTRAL (for tix, information, etc.) 1 8th Street Noon-8, Daily
FringeNYC.org (for tix and everything else)

*This was a hypothetical example. If there actually is a puppet show from Montreal in the festival, I meant to cast no aspersions.

Who doesn't like a good desecration?

I know, I know I spent yesterday's blog post raving about how much I like the fin de siecle commercial art from the last century. And I do. But I also have a real fondness for the punk rock desecration of dada and the burgeoning surrealists after the First World War. A couple of weekends ago I went to the Art Book Fair at PS 1. I didn't bring much cash or my checkbook as I didn't want to spend more than I could afford. The one thing I did buy was an unbound sheet from Max Ernst's surrealist novel, Une Semaine du Bonté.


I'm really pleased with it, but I'm not sure what to do with it. It's two sided, so it's complicated to frame or mount. The thing managed to survive a world war pretty much unscathed and there's a part of me that thinks it might be appropriate to shoot bullets through it. I've been thinking about this since going to see the Emory Douglas exhibit at the New Museum. It's really extraordinary stuff and so worth seeing, but I've always thought there's something a little weird about looking at revolutionary art in clean museum spaces devoid of the context in which it was originally created.


The theater we made in the '90s on the Lower East Side felt revolutionary, and out of that sprung the New York International Fringe Festival, which has become a cultural institution itself, for good or ill. A lot of theater artists I respect feel that we are in post-narrative times and the only argument have against this is that I really, really like narrative, which isn't an argument at all. Humans crave structure and this craving comes from a deep, primitive, DNA level of need. (one of the things I've read that really helped me make sense of the world is, "Humans like categories, nature likes a spectrum"). And if there's one thing I've said again and again it's that structure in a theater piece does not equal plot.


I haven't completed a play in a really long time. I'm a very bad playwright. I began working on a play called Tricks With Makeup shortly after 9/11 which has been gnawing at my brain ever since. I never thought of it as being surrealistic, but that's what it is. Then a year or two ago I began working on it again as a short story. I think I just need to finish it and not worry about it making sense. I've also been (finally) working on a new play called The City is an Island, which like Tricks With Makeup takes place in a bar. I keep on thinking of City as my Brecht play, silly as that may be in light of the NYC Kill Your Idols aesthetic I was raised with. It's an apocalypse play with songs.


A lot of theater is really boring, and I think the proliferation of MFA programs has caused this country to be inundated with even more boring, bad theater. It's frightening to me that people writing boring bad plays in MFA programs are compounding the problem by teaching innocent little undergraduates. Today someone on Facebook posted this interesting article about Lesbian theater artists, which included the following quote from Sarah Schulman:

"The most destructive ethic in mainstream theater is that familiarity equals quality. They think that work that repeats what is already known is good, and work that expands what is already known is wrong or badly written."

Happily, Schulman is teaching now, and Paula Vogel (the playwright who made me want to be a playwright) is heading up the program at Yale and I've heard that Scrappy Jack is teaching, too. Baby steps, I guess, but I truly believe that good art is not born out of the University system, and if good art does emerge from MFA programs it is a completely inadvertent and random occurrence, and not any sort of proof that this is an effective way to train artists. My displeasure with how theater is taught in schools really deserves it's own post, so I won't go into it too deeply here. Let me just say that theater is multi-disciplinary by nature and that fact is pretty widely ignored. Also, good artists tend to figure things out for themselves in or out of school. So, I guess what I'm saying here is that I'm ready to throw myself back into the fray. A lot of years have passed, and one of the people I used to talk about this stuff with is working for Big Law, others don't speak to me any more, and I've become reacquainted with other artists that I used to know. I'm pretty sure I want to spend my middle years making things, so I really need to start now.

Post-FringeNYC: Viral

Just a quick note about Mac Rogers's show Viral. See it!

He wrote the truly wonderful Universal Robots that was included in the same Plays & Playwrights anthology as Antarctica. I don't say this a lot about my contemporaries, but he can really fucking write. His dialogue is magnificent. His ideas are creepy and weird without any sort of overplaying of his hand.

It's about three people who are sexually aroused by watching people die - not by watching violence, but by watching the life-force leave the body. It reminded me a bit of J.G. Ballard's Crash, a serious examination of a sexual fetish that I'm not entirely sure exists and is the blackest of black comedies. The acting is just lovely too, Rebecca Comtois (pictured above, with Kent Meister and Matthew Trumbull) particularly stood out to me.

Note to Manhattan Theater Club and Playwrights Horizons: many of the plays you've been producing in recent years have been embarrassingly bad. Really. There are other American playwrights besides Itamar Moses and Christopher Shin. Promise.

Viral
Gideon Productions
The Soho Playhouse
15 Vandam Street
Sunday, September 27, 6pm

(photo: via viraltheplay.com)

FringeNYC 13: The Antarctic Chronicles

Men Wanted

For Hazardous
Journey,
Small wages
Bitter cold,
Long months of complete
Darkness,
Constant danger,
Safe return doubtful.
Honour and recognition in
Case of success.

Men Wanted is my favorite prose poem. Of course, it's not really a poem at all, it's the advertisement Ernest Shackleton placed in The Times in 1913 when he was in search of men to accompany him on an expedition to journey to the South Pole. The best part is that he received hundreds and hundreds of responses.

I'm a little obsessed with Antarctica. I've mentioned this before here on this blog when I went to see Werner Herzog's remarkable documentary. Most people reading this know I wrote a play called Antarctica about two teenage girls and their journey to a fictional continent of ice and snow called "Antarctica" and their search for something else, for something that would make their lives different, better. For reasons I don't entirely understand, an inordinately large part of my psyche is taken up by dreams of a landscape that is so beautiful and severe it looks like another planet.

This brings me to Jessica Manuel's The Antarctic Chronicles, a show in which she tells of the year she spent in the icy south after answering the modern equivalent of Shackleton's Times advert. I loved this show, but I've been sitting on this review for days now because I'm having a lot of trouble writing about it. There are so many thematic parallels between Manuel's non-fiction, but stylized account, and my fictional play about a pretend Antarctica, that it just feels a little uncanny to me. Both pieces are about very young American women who feel lost and at loose ends and view Antarctica as a path to a new self and a meaningful life. Both pieces use the phrase "there are no polar bears in Antarctica" repeatedly. In both, girls are driven nearly mad by the brutal environment. But hers is real and mine is not, so enough about my play and on to hers.

Jessica Manuel spent a year in the McMurdo Station on Ross Island where she worked as a fuels operator, lived through a winter of darkness and monitored the color of her pee. She also saw the sun set and then rise again in the space of a minute, went from FNG (fungie, i.e. Fucking New Guy) to pro with "ice time", made crappy yet hilarious films, drove a rig, fueled planes, visited the Russian station, fell in and out of love and changed her life. That's it I guess, I mean what draws people like me to the idea of travel - as a catalyst to life change. In my play Magda says if they travel to Antarctica "it will change everything". For Jessica Manuel it did, she found a sense of self and a purpose that was lacking. The show itself is huge amounts of fun - hilarious and self-aware.

Winston Churchill thought Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914 was a waste. The Pole had already been located by Amundsen and Scott, who died there. He went anyway and encountered disaster, but pulled every single person who went with him out alive. He was revered by his men, and rightly so. His story is extraordinary and inspiring in the most old-fashioned heroic sense. I firmly believe that there are things in the world worth doing and that the world in the the early 21st century is both vast and tiny. The age of exploration is mostly over, but one's life can still be altered by journeys to icy lands. As Ernest Shackleton once said: "We all have our White South."

After my show Antarctica closed in FringeNYC 2007, a male acquaintance told me that he enjoyed it, but he thought the story of Polar exploration was essentially a man's story. All I can say is that he doesn't have any Ice Time whatsoever.

Because it took me such a ridiculously long time to write this piece, The Antarctic Chronicles has closed in NYC. But hopefully she'll remount it again.

(photo: Zoee B)

FringeNYC 13: The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer

Last Saturday night I exhaustedly dragged myself to FringeClub and the Variety Power Hour after eating a truly fantastic scallop ceviche and drinking way more wine than I should have after tramping around in the muggy heat all day (like, two glasses. I'm a lightweight).

This year, the weekend show (admission with a FringeNYC pass or $5) is being hosted by Charlie LaGreca - his brother Jeff is currently MIA, but will be returning to co-host soon, I hear. So, on Saturday, the lone brother LaGreca was joined on stage by an Australian.

The Australian at FringeClub with Charlie LaGreca

I had no idea who the Australian was, so I PMed Charlie the next day who told me this new Power Hour acquisition was Tim Watts, from the show The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer.

I saw the show the other night and I am just smitten with the whole thing. Watts combines puppets, animation and live music to tell a melancholy and funny post-apocalyptic undersea adventure that exudes so much charm it simply shouldn't be allowed. Oh, and he runs the whole show himself using a Wii.



See? If he lived in NY the damn thing would run for years.

The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer
HERE Arts Center - Dorothy B. Williams Theatre
Weeping Spoon Prductions
Writer: Tim Watts
Remaining Performances: Sat 22@2:15, Sun 23@8:15, Thurs 27@7:30

P.S. Excitement! I just discovered an interview with me and Maggie Cino from 2007 on the FringeClub site. Who knew? The show also includes an interview with the lovely and multi-talented Melle Powers.

FringeNYC 13: A Time To Dance

The last sentence of my very favorite book, Angela Carter's Wise Children is: What a joy it is to dance and sing! For my money, it's the best novel about theater ever written - the story of Nora and Dora Chance, identical twins and geriatric chorines whose long life and career zooms through celebrity, decay, musical reviews, Hollywood, men, boys, and a Shakespearean theatrical dynasty. It's music hall magic realism and just dizzyingly good.

Libby Skala's A Time To Dance possesses that same rare and joyful energy. Skala plays her own great-aunt, Elizabeth Polk, in a gleeful one woman dance/performance through two world wars, fortune, poverty, innovation (in both dance and clothing fasteners), and a hilariously bad marriage. It's difficult to explain accurately the charm of this show. As played by her niece, Polk was clearly one of the world's rarities - a deeply happy person who possessed the gift of bringing joy to others. Late in her life she pioneered dance therapy, using movement and dance to enrich and help the lives of deaf, developmentally disabled and emotionally disturbed children. I do wonder whether the benefits derived by her students stemmed from the methods she developed or from her own force of personality. Polk had a long, well lived life and Libby Skala is an extraordinary performer. This is a great story, told with economy, verve and just a grain of the magical.

Interestingly, after I saw the show, I was raving about it to a male acquaintance. After I described it briefly, he asked me, "is this a girl play?". I very nearly lost it. Why do so many people who should know otherwise believe the lives of women could only be of possible interest to other women? To answer the question: No. It's for everyone.

Back to Libby Skala. A few years ago I saw her show, Lilia!, in which she played her grandmother Lilia Skala - Elizabeth Polk's sister. She had a fascinating life as well - she trained as an architect, acted with Max Reinhardt's company (which made me wonder if she knew Hedy Lamarr), and went on to receive an Oscar nomination for acting in Lilies of the Field opposite Sydney Poitier. Clearly, Skala comes from an extraordinary family. And this is the best part - there was a third sister.

Elizabeth Polk, 1930s Vienna

A Time To Dance
Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street - The Lafayette Street Theatre
Artistic New Directions
Writer: Libby Skala
Remaining Performances: Thurs 20@9:45, Fri 21@3:00, Mon 24@9:45

(photo courtesy of Grace Polk)