Life on the Fringe(s)

As many of you know, I’ve attempted to make the best of my currently underemployed status, by volunteering, attending bicycle advocacy events, and by throwing myself more or less headlong into the local theater community (specifically with respect to the Capital Fringe Festival).  I helped a friend setup the web site for her female-oriented production company, Nu Sass Productions.  And I purchased an All Access pass to the Fringe, reasoning that the Festival would be both a great occupier of time as well as networking opportunity.

So far, the early highlights of the Fringe include:

• The all-female production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Area Dead –   I know I can’t really be counted on to be an unbiased critic here, but the taut, 85-minute production exposes the audience to the best of Stoppard’s absurdist tragicomedy in a spare, minimalist fashion.
• Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s Roadside Review’s The Saints – Not high theater, but rollicking good fun, a musical in six acts about Christian saints that provides Review cast ample opportunity to rock out, dress up, and in at least one case gender bend.
• Kevin Thornton’s Sex, Dreams & Self-Control – a one-man show about growing up, coming out and finding one’s self.  Wickedly funny, deeply personal, both powerful and powerfully embarrassing at times.  When asked to describe it to another Fringer, I called it a gay musical Spaulding Gray monologue.

• 4.48 Psychosis – A deeply disturbing piece, Factory 449′s staging of playwright Sarah Kane’s final work prior to her suicide is an example of art imitating life.  The play, like its author, is by turns maddeningly lucid and deeply psychotic.  Not for the faint of heart.