Philly Fringe Dispatch, Week 1
The best, the worst, and a supplement to the fringe guide
For the month of Philly Fringe, I’ll be doing a weekly diary roundup with short-form coverage of what I’ve been seeing. My hope is this will be more readable, while also saving some time on my end (although concision is often harder, there’s less to edit and review, and the work of pulling up all the details of, say, who designed what, is not always easy to find for a fringe show without a program or press kit) allowing me to be more comprehensive. I may work up some longer form as things go on. Read to the end for a supplement to the Fringe Guide I posted before the festival.
My week began at Freak Mic for a fringe preview night on Labor Day. Just getting back to town from the weekend away, I brought my luggage inside my apartment before hauling myself to Milkboy South St for the biweekly event hosted by John Miller Glitner and Liam Paris. Dan Kitrosser and Chris Davis were among those showing excerpts, and you should check out their shows, though given a packed schedule it looks like I won’t be able to make Davis’s The Presented until the last weekend.
Wednesday
Carnival of Feelings promises a carnival-cum-therapy, but it didn't live up to the premise as it moved slowly through a handful of stations. A 30-45 minute experience rather than the promised 15-30. Crowded into the Asian Arts Initiative storefront gallery space, it felt more like a haunted house trying to teach healthy coping mechanisms than it did a carnival. Given “feelings cards” to fill out after each station, at the end two emotions showed up twice on mine: bored and awkward.
5 Stagehands Fall Out of a Closet (The Goose Crisis) is an ideal night at the fringe: in a bar’s small back room watching something zany, absurd and not quite fully baked. The rawness only adds to the surreality of this ambitious show. Grace Lazarz performs as a series of eccentrics while aided and menaced by stagehands. Grace is a friend, but the sold-out opening night crowd would agree that she has the chops to match the weirdness of her characters. A team of strong players including Brooke Shilling and Patrick Burke as the stagehands try to steal the spotlight, but they don’t succeed. More shows in weird little rooms, please. Highly Recommended. Continues on Wednesdays, 7 pm at the Trestle Inn.
John Miller Glitner takes us on a trip to the beach in Family Vacation. Narrating much of the trip in second person, Glitner’s affability, enthusiasm, and generosity invite us into their comic PowerPoint as they satirize their own family, grief and loss and all. One recurring gag might have overstayed its welcome, but maybe I was just getting tired and regretting skipping dinner. Recommended. Continues on Wednesdays, 8:30 pm at the Trestle Inn.
Thursday
I was prevented from seeing That Dough Tho on Thursday. I had been excited to finally see mike durkin’s food-sharing work after having been curious about his practice in previous fringes—and to eat some bread. Surely a win-win for whoever did see it, despite the rain.
The puppet and design work in Blue Silk, a project that Cinco a.k.a. Salvador Castillo Placensia V premiered in Cannonball last year and has worked extensively on since, including a run at the Denver Fringe, are at a level of sophistication not typically seen in the fast load-in and out world of the fringe. I'm not so sure that the narrative’s allegory or the deliberate pacing really work, but such things are easy to forgive in a 40 minute show, especially when the puppets are so winning.
Friday
I was planning to see a 5 pm showing of Pennsylvania Semiconscious Liberation Army (through September 28 at the Louis Bluver) but decided to stay home and cook dinner instead. When I did finally leave the house, I stood for a minute, ready to leave, looking around and wondering what I was forgetting to take with me. Turns out, I forgot to put my leftovers in the fridge.
If you missed Weathering from Faye Driscoll, well, sucks to be you. Sold out, but the house was undersold. Weathering has been touring for two years, so there's much to read about it that you can find with your favorite search engine. Why don't more live artists use scent?
FringeArts has apparently done away with any pretense of having programs for shows, even digital ones, relying only on a “know before you go” email. Sucks!
I finished the night with a preview of Pretty Dog Pop Star by Anna Azizzy out of Pittsburgh. Pretty Dog has grown out of comics they drew, and so, making fitting use of the art gallery venue, has a very charming black and white, two dimensional cartoon aesthetic, from props to animated projected backdrops that Azizzy interacts with. This was unfinished when I saw it, so don't expect something super polished. Instead, expect a weird little show about a miracle performing pop star dog. Musical numbers (the full title is Pretty Dog Pop Show: A Day in the Life of a Beautiful Dog: THE MUSICAL!), a driving underscore, and props and scenography clever and charming in their simplicity. Recommended, though it may lack some polish—but this is fringe, yeah? September 13 through 26, including Tuesday the 16th, at Practice Gallery. Shoutout to weird little rooms.
Saturday
Speaking of weird rooms, Dan Kitrosser is KAREN TENDERNESS in QUEER WINDOW is the first show ever in the Isaiah Zagar mosaic-tiled Magic Gardens Studio. Maybe the most appropriate room in Philadelphia for this tale of mid-life self-discovery and coming out, call it a queer room, and also the perfect opportunity for you to take a new photo for the dating app of your choice before the show: cliche, but different!
Karen Tenderness is a kind of anti-tradwife in a sexless marriage with a man named Burl who is in charge of building new high rises in downtown Butte Creek—he’s the suburb’s erection man. After some misadventures, she ends up stuck in one such tower, missing her neighbors in her cul-de-ballsac, where she finds a queer window, sings “I Have Neighbors” and parodies Rear Window. Probably my favorite moment in the show (besides when my friend, having been dragged on stage, gave an out of pocket answer to a question that made Dan crack), which takes on the Hitchcockian thriller as a genre more than it does Rear Window specifically. A highlight of a Kitrosser cabaret is his crowdwork, which was at times almost aggressive (in the playful sense) toward a few in the audience who were less-than-prepared to participate, making it even funnier. Pun laden wholesome filth. Recommended. Continues through September 13 at the Magic Gardens Watkins Street Studio. 75 minutes.
On exiting the venue, I was flyered by monologist Becky Bondurant for her show Penis Envy, which is returning to the Philly Fringe as part of Cannonball. Penis Envy caught my eye when it was at the Yellow Bicycle last year, though I wasn’t able to fit it into my schedule. I can’t again this year (the distance between Cannonball at the Drake and Cannonball at Asian Arts Initiative is a bummer), but it sounds like a well executed show with plenty of tour-earned polish, and the monologue is a subgenre of solo performance that maybe doesn’t get enough love. September 12 to 14 at the Louis Bluver at the Drake.
With about a half hour to kill, I considered a stop in at Watkins Drinkery but instead opted to have a snack, and, as I reached into my bag to grab my apple, noticed the Varallo Brothers Bakery is open late. The apple fell back into the bag.
A group of Penn State alums brought Roadkill Bambi to Edinburgh, and now it's in South Philly. This one act play with a great title has interesting ideas, but gets ahead of the audience. It's slow to establish the relationships between its main characters, and though it takes pains to establish that there's a time loop, including an opening discussion of Groundhog Day, it's not clear what is happening til later in the play. Roadkill is like a heavier, metaphor-laden Groundhog Day crossed with a bleak, bizarro Sure Thing. Enthusiastic performances meet the further acting (and directing) challenge of basically sitting in a car for an hour, and for me, it's not quite answered. That's partly a question of naturalistic acting style, especially when it veers toward horror for a few minutes. Nevertheless, consistently got laughs from a good chunk of the intimate, storefront theater. Continues through September 27 at the Sawubona Creativity Project. 55 minutes.
Sunday
I squeezed Nepobaby Psychodrama by Jacob Peter Kovner, out of Berlin, into my agenda based on Alex Tatarsky’s recommendation. Nepobaby casts the audience as paid participants in Kovner’s psychodrama, to play the part of his abusive and very rich family. Kovner has a trust fund and has been making work about it. Though it’s unclear here which biographical details are real and which are fiction (Kovner’s real-life billionaire dad is not, in fact, dead), the promise of pay turns out to be very real, and the show becomes conceptually rich with work and greed as the audience gets engaged. Transition into the second, more grotesque part of the show is a touch abrupt, though the move into a final section that emphasizes the baby in nepobaby is smoother. Anchored by a strong performance by Kovner, this isn’t just a vanity project nor psychotherapy, but it isn’t necessarily not that either. Highly recommended, even if you don't get paid. Continues at the Louis Bluver at the Drake on September 10. 60 minutes.
asses.masses from lead artists Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Limis a 7+ hour video game in which audience members take turns at the controller, and where everyone is watching, expected to cheer, offer suggestions, and so on, advertised as having the a vibe between watching your friends play games at a house party to a movie marathon.
Within minutes of starting the gameplay, which was about 20 minutes late, which seems to be normal for FringeArts even when the house is open well before start time, as this was, one man in the audience began reading aloud all of the captions in the game, adopting new voices for each character. Now, I don’t know what your friends are like, but I’m pretty sure if you did this particular thing while watching your buddy play Zelda, you’d get yelled at. Because rather than staying in the role of audience-player, shouting the dialogue out turns whoever does it into an interpreter, a performer, forcing themselves as an intermediary onto everyone else. It’s watching a foreign movie only to have someone else in the cinema reading the subtitles outloud. Easily one of the worst experiences I've ever had in a theater, from what amounts to a total lack of rules—which the artists are playing with—and a lack of etiquette by a minority of the audience. After an hour and a half of gameplay, plus the 20 minute hold and 10 minutes or so of introduction and a character-building quiz, the first of four intermissions arrived. The advertised vegetarian snack spread turned out to be candy, chips, soda and juice, bananas and oranges, ameliorating neither my hunger nor the weirdly unpleasant vibe. While I was prepared to be bored, I draw a line at being annoyed.
Without the promise of a decent meal in another two hours and despite my curiosity about the turns of the storyline, I left. Should I have done my part and shouted, “Shut it! We can all read!” (before you cancel me on behalf of the vision impaired, attendees of the show are informed of the necessity of reading). Am I complicit? Maybe. Would it have even worked? It takes agreement to enforce norms, as anyone who has ridden public transit since the invention of the smartphone knows. Once someone else chimed in with a different voice, affirming the move but in competition with him as he continued his dramatic reading, it was game over. asses.masses is about work, choices, collectivity, tedium, technological progress and luddism—and on what had become a beautiful late-summer afternoon, I exercised my choice to spend it enjoying the sunshine and seeing something I might actually enjoy. If we truly take the inference from the title, maybe the way to win the game is by choosing to not be an ass, choosing not to play.
I mentioned in my fringe preview that it’s messed up to program an 8 hour event against the independent artists. But now I can't believe that FringeArts programmed this into their own space to force Weathering, a monumental work that deserves to be seen by as many people as possible, into a Saturday evening load-out. All other things being equal, 7+ hours in a dark theater playing a game together would hit different on a dreary winter day, as the last-minute, Sunday morning marketing email from FringeArts suggested about the rain.
After enjoying the late-afternoon sun, and with my evening clear, I was left with some choices: do I catch the lecture performance Fascist Groove, or maybe Haute Glue or even Clowncuterie? I decided to take myself home to West Philly, recuperate, enjoy some vegetables, and stayed in the neighborhood for The Presented.
Chris Davis tells us he’s from the “golden age of art,” in this show he first did in 2018, looking back at an even earlier time when grant funding was more plentiful and weirdos like Geoff Sobelle could become artworld stars by being “presented.” Davis weaves a mourning of this loss with the struggles of being a working artist, the moments from his childhood that hooked him on performing, and hope—Geoff is going to see his show and launch him to the upper echelons of the touring circuit. Referencing Sobelle, Philly Fringe founder Nick Stuccio, and FringeArts 2016 presentation of Romeo Castellucci's Julius Caesar. Spared Parts (speaking of live artists using scent…) at the Navy Yard, the show is perhaps dated, with Davis wearing a shirt from a show he made in 2012. But Davis is from the “before times” and the passage of time and details like Stuccio’s departure from FringeArts only add to the longing and the stinging.
Davis namedrops Ivo Van Hove, Elevator Repair Service, the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, Jérôme Bel and Ben Brantley (a moment of added depth here with Brantley’s successor currently being removed from the NYT theater desk, if not a missed opportunity to update the text), among others, and 19th century actress Adah Isaacs Menken, who becomes a character, a mentor to Davis. Menken, famous for hippodrama, provides an equine throughline from Spared Parts to the fantastic show that Davis imagines and describes for himself which, inexplicably, also features a horse. Here’s the humiliations of networking events, the power of art (real and imagined), a loving institutional critique, the burden of being an artist, and the gift. Highly recommended, I think people into theater, whether or not you make it yourself, into the fringe and experimental, interested in questions of production and funding—which is to say, readers of this newsletter—will be richly rewarded here. Through September 28 on weekend evenings at Studio 34.
Checking Instagram, I see that asses.masses ran 9 hours. Sometimes being presented isn’t all that.
Fringe Guide Supplemental
White Room is a musical installation from Sepehr Pirasteh, where the movement of the audience impacts what gets played. I took a look at the proposal for this on Pirasteh’s website and it looks interesting, and I like the way it (literally) sounds. Sept 10—14 at Asian Arts Initiative.
An Evening With Complicity Huffman by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, who is also doing a reading on the 12th hosted by La La Lil Jidar. Poets are allowed to make theater, it's not illegal! Sept 11-16 at the Louis Bluver at the Drake.
The Spit poetry series returns to Dahlak in West Philadelphia on September 14. It’s getting a mention here for featuring Henry Goldkamp, a poet integrating clowning into his practice and who teaches clown studies. Goldkamp is on the road in support of a new book, JOY BUZZER: A Clown Show. Clowns are allowed to be poets, it is not illegal.
NYC-based Zimbabwean choreographer nora chipaumire will be at FringeArts with an ambulatory dance installation titled Dambuzdo, referencing a Shona word meaning trouble or suffering, and the writer Dambudzo Marechera. “Large-scale plastic paintings [...] construct a Zimbabwean shabini—an informal bar set up in private residences, where citizens gather to invoke the possibilities of resistance and insurrection.” Timely! Sept 18—20
Another piece of the FringeArts curated fringe, The Goldberg Variations appears deeply undersold by its vague description: “Loosely set to Bach’s enigmatic Goldberg Variations, this unconventional performance evolves each time it’s performed. Desires are indulged and deconstructed. Fantasies are conjured and manifested. The Goldberg Variations takes audiences on a reckless, tender, and at times unhinged deep-dive into the tensions between dominance, submission, heartbreak, and vulnerability.” Okay, but what is it? This is a great example of how a show listing can go wrong, focusing on themes and abstractions without keywords that describe it in concrete terms. The scant writing on the show I've been able to find suggests something much more interesting than a typical solo show about identity and desire. Canadian Clayton Lee (who has terrible SEO btw, worse even than this newsletter) smashes his own history of desire against Bach and pro-wrestler Bill Goldberg. Sept 12—13
“Be Good!” With Paulette from D.C.-based clown Daniel Maseda is fresh off a run at the Edinburgh fringe, with good word of mouth there and here in Philly. Heavy on the crowdwork, Maseda’s Paulette is very polite. Sept 6—24th at Asian Arts Initiative
Helpful Hints for Strength and Health for Busy People, by Rhonda Moore + Ben Grinberg | Almanac Projects, sounds like a ripe encounter between a young artist (acrobat Grinberg, of Almanac and Cannonball) and an older artist (dancer Moore, who was a founding member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company). Sept 23—27 at the Louis Bluver at the Drake.
If you get an audience survey from a theater, and they ask what media you read and listen to, be sure to mention Plays Unpleasant!