Philly Fringe Dispatch, Week 2
The dumb, the dumber, the silly, the punk, the anti-fascist punk, a family show, physical theater, one of the worst shows I've ever seen, and a Samuel Beckett cabaret.
Regular readers of Plays Unpleasant may notice that, for the fringe, I’ve broken with my normal recommendation system. There’s two reasons for this, the first being that I don’t see how giving a recommendation on a show that you can’t go see is useful, so I’m only recommending and linking to things that are still open as of publication.
The other reason, and perhaps the more important one, is to offer more holistic coverage, in particular to reflect the often working nature of independently produced Fringe shows versus full productions of finished plays that have typically had weeks of rehearsal.
Monday
I don't know what's worse, not having a program at all, or having a half sheet of paper that's a teaser for a program that you can scan a QR code for. You want me to take my phone out and go online immediately before a show? Fine. What bothers me more about this, at FringeArts presentations, is the inconsistency. Why is there a program at Beautiful Human Lies: Chapter 4, but not Weathering or The Goldberg Variations? It’s confusing.
This evening length solo from choreographer Rennie Harris for Megan Bridge caught my eye not only because I like contemporary dance, not only because it’s presented, but largely because as an undergrad I would go to all the thesis dance concerts at SUNY Purchase that I could. So the idea of a middle aged dancer revisiting the work she danced there not only intrigued me, but got me, now in early-middle age myself, feeling nostalgic.
Harris and Bridge took that 7 minute piece, Beautiful Human Lies: Chapter 2 as a jumping off point for Chapter 4, which begins with an excavation of that piece, or at least an exploration of the context, and we hear audio from conversations between Harris and Bridge about it. Bridge asked Harris to do the choreography out of hometown pride, being from the Philly suburbs, and had seen and been moved by Harris’s work. She had no relationship to hip hop dance, and felt she had no relationship to hip hop at all, though Harris challenges this and she reveals she knew all of “Funky Cold Medina.” Especially interesting to me, was the reaction of Bridge's faculty to the piece, that the ballet faculty were appreciative of the technical elements, but her own modern teachers found it lacking “technique.” She recounts that Harris notes this was racist.
But this is only the entryway into an hour-long piece, often bathed in purple light. Bridge recounts, too, why she approached Harris again now in middle age (not a lot of demand for forty something dancers). The piece is punctuated by these expositions. In one, she discusses how she has been working on vocalizing on stage, which she always avoided, and even sings. I found the juxtaposition between so much dance technique and experience and so little speech technique to be more jarring than productive, but this is a bias of mine. I didn't always find this compelling, despite my belief in lifelong growth, especially as an artist (what one should do in life does not always make good art itself), but there's a through line between this personal growth and healing and the choreography, of course. There's a recurring pattern where Bridge would grab her crotch, and as if her arm belonged to another, her hand would move up to her breast, and then to her mouth to cover her mouth stretching as if to cry out.
It was a beautiful evening. The original score from composer Peter Price made me think of Autechre. I don't have a whole lot to say here, in large part because I wasn't taking notes, and to some degree because I feel like I lack the vocabulary to really talk in an informed way about dance. Although that's more of an insecurity than it is a reality, it does reflect a lack of the depth of knowledge compared to when I think about theater and other more closely related forms of contemporary performance. The only dance class I took in college I quickly dropped because I was too busy working on my own thesis project.
I also liked this at the Proscenium at the Drake, an intimate little venue for dance, it turns out. But why is the theater called that? There's no proscenium, just a HVAC duct.
Tuesday
With only a handful of Fringe shows programmed, I took the day off from Fringe, and, when I saw my friend make a post about being at the Met for the Pulp concert, I bought myself a cheap resale ticket and hustled there arriving half an hour after the posted start-time, and milled around another half hour til the concert began. The show started (and ended) with four inflatable wacky waving arm men. Did you know that they’re called tube men or air dancers? I just learned that for this. This is at least the second time I’ve seen one on stage, the other being Fat Ham at the Wilma.
Hearing “This is Hardcore” live is just what I always wanted, and I would've been content if the concert ended there.
Wednesday
After a gig, I rushed myself to Krampus Gets Kramped and missed the opening few minutes, a segment telling the story of Krampus. What proceeds from there is, to a large extent, a fairly straightforward biography of the two founders of The Cramps, the psychobilly punk band, told via crankie, a scroll which is cranked between two rollers, exposing its contents like a scrolling video game. Jim Julien switches through several scrolls to tell the story, mostly in a monochrome black against the scroll in a block print or cut-out style. He cranks the scroll, emotes, and occasionally he operates puppets behind the crankie box which interact with the contents of the scroll. The puppets are neat, these moments are the highlights.
The story, with one exception, is narrated by recorded audio, and is told with a steady pace, landing somewhere between podcast and storybook narration. The strength here is the visual art. For a show about punk rockers, I kept wondering, where's the punk energy? Continues through September 28, Asian Arts Initiative storefront. 45 minutes.
Over at the Dumb Hub, Mimebaby Theatre hosted Mimebaby Mudlap, a brief parade of Pig Iron alumni clowns being clowns. At times bizarre, hilarious, absurd and approaching disturbing, these included Midge Nease as Tiffany Charcuterie as a disco ball and a particularly deranged performance about shaving from Faysal Can Dakni, which made me look forward to his fringe show, El idioma de lo silenciado.
Thursday
Of all the shows I've seen in the MAAS Building, Total Modeling a solo “avant-clown” show by Benoît François (aka Benjamin Stieler) with direction by Mason Rosenthal, easily makes the best and most creative use of the MAAS studio, activating the features of the room in ways I haven't seen anyone else attempt. There's a strong aesthetic. The things that are said in Total Modeling, however, are largely pseudo-philosophical and absurd nonsense. There's nothing wrong with that, per se, especially in clowning, but François doesn't connect with the audience to make us care about it, nor give the jokes (or moments of vulnerability) time to land and breathe. That’s the one thing I think of as a constant between different schools of clowning, the relationship to the audience. I found myself wondering how much of Total Modeling is meant to be funny. Through September 19 at the MAAS building. 65 minutes.
I walked over to the Dumb Hub, where Jackie Skinner was doing her new show, Composed. Skinner is very funny, even down to how she credits her collaborator Matt Raub as “consiglieri.” A pair of hands appeared from behind a curtain, they counted. “One” the audience responds. Two. Three. Four. Five. Two. Four. Eight. Four. We fall behind, we’re confused, we catch up. It’s chaos. It’s… a game of charades? A second pair of hands appears. Thus Skinner establishes a raucous energy before she even enters. She conjures from diverse forms of comedy, like vaudeville. She fumbles with her notebook and an accordion. She raps. She leans into a microphone just to clear her throat.
At times—often—deep silly, Composed takes a dark turn towards its end. It doesn't quite nail that pivot and stick the landing, as Skinner implied the audience was turning on her in a way that I don't think we were. And I don't think I was prepared for it by how fun and bonkers the show was for the first forty minutes (though I did find myself, now and again, pondering the title). But as a new show, Skinner said it remains a work in progress. In progress or not, this may turn out to be the funniest thing I see (footnote: does anyone know the appropriate tense here for the thing I’ve seen but also the future possible) during the festival. I was especially tickled when an object appeared that, though it doesn’t look like it, is a puppet. Being familiar with this particular gag, I was delighted as I waited for the reveal and as the rest of the audience caught up to what was going on.
Friday
Arriving again at Asian Arts Initiative, I notice the entryway smells of phở. I wait with other patrons for us to be brought up as a collective to Sepehr Pirasteh’s White Room. Stepping off the elevator, there’s a tiny speaker that explains the project, if you bend close enough to it. In the main room, illuminated by black light, the four members of the ARCX Quartet are in the corners, inside boxy tents—two shadowed, two projected upon—playing their string instruments. The music is contemporary. Atmospheric. There are more tiny speakers, knobs, and buttons attached to the structural columns in the center of the room. The buttons, I discover, impact the video projections: they switch between clips, or distort the image, throw up phrases (commands, truisms) or blot out the images, though at first I was listening for change rather than looking, especially as they controlled the projection at the opposite end of the room. The knobs, I counted five, when turned up or down changed the score we were hearing, making what was pleasant more or less harsh, disjointed, loud, chaotic, each presumably controlling a different variable, while the speakers whispered about authoritarianism and propaganda.
After a half hour, I felt like I had experienced all there was to see and hear, with twenty minutes left to go, and I began to long for not only additional types of interactivity, but also musical progression or narrative development. As an installation, though, I think it’s very successful, even at this stage that seemed more proof of concept than a fully resourced project. Pirasteh told me he wants to expand the piece and add more interactivity, and that he's been noticing that audiences have been hesitant to talk and make changes collectively. The thought had only occurred to me in passing, if it truly occurred to me at all. The darkened space and music, for me at least, contributed to the quiet-polite concert or theater going vibe, even as I was curious about what the knob turning produced.
As I was already there, I watched the beginning of Anh Vo’s performance, Untitled (Break Fast) for the opening of their exhibition Punish, Perform, Possess at Asian Arts Initiative. Behind a megaphone, flanked by two more megaphones, while a drummer played in an alcove above, Vo stood over a stock pot full of pho broth steaming on an induction burner. Another performer, Kristel Baldoz, began wiping the floor, which was also a chalkboard, clean of what was written on it.
Vo began to speak, and shortly I had to leave, securing a slice of pizza before making the jaunt toward Old City and FringeArts.
Clayton Lee, Canadian curator and artistic director of the Fierce festival in Birmingham, UK, is a “performance artist”—I put this in quotes because I don’t really believe what he’s doing is in the tradition of performance art. Certainly, we’re in a theater, and FringeArts thinks so, too, as they list it as “theater.” In 2020, Lee presented an earlier iteration of the The Goldberg Variations during an international hour of the Bearded Ladies Cabaret twelve-hour online Late Night Snacks “FEAST.”
As the audience enters, Lee, wearing a Bill Goldberg t-shirt, passes out beers, both to people entering and to those already sat, instructing others to pass them up behind them. This is where the charm of the show starts, it’s also about where it ends.
Clayton Lee is obsessed with Bill Goldberg, the professional wrestler, and the entire show is devoted to his own sexual obsessions with big balding white guys. He theorizes that “all his exes are variations on Bill Goldberg.” Hence, The Goldberg Variations, punning on Bach. It will turn out that the show is not even “loosely set to Bach’s enigmatic Goldberg Variations” as the promotional copy promises, and that the title is nothing more than a pun, as no meaningful connection to Bach ever materializes. If that sounds to you like the show is not clever, you are correct.
Clayton Lee is a bad ex. He stalks his exes online. It’s creepy. He stalks his exes live on the FringeArts stage. He uses an incognito browser to stalk one who blocked him on “all social media platforms.” Why would a theater enable this? He says “there is a version of the show” in his ex’s house, as it’s an AirBnb, and he reads reviews of it from the live AirBnb website, unable to find one of the particular reviews he likes. It’s creepy (this is where, were I not a critic, I would have walked out). He lists off many of these versions. The first is one where we’ve “done the work” and read the relevant wikipedia entries, which, he has open on the screen center stage. “There’s a version of the show where I map the United States onto Bill Goldberg’s body,” he says, ending the thought with, “the manifest destiny of his back.” Sounds profound, perhaps, unless you have even the vaguest sense of what manifest destiny means. Later, at a moment meant to be powerful, after Lee has taken some pains to construct an image, he says there’s a version of the show where one of his exes shows up, which, in my research, seems to have actually happened. But because Lee consistently renders these versions of this show as imaginary, we have no idea it’s not, and the moment is meaningless.
He interviews a member of the audience, a “Goldberg,” first playing it straightforward, asking him about his night, then as if he is his ex. He asks the audience member if he would kiss him (he does), if he would call him a faggot (he will not), if he would choke him (he does, and doesn’t know how). When the audience-interview segment ends, stagehands strike the screen and podium from the stage revealing four men wearing black with red ropes strung between them, as in a wrestling ring.
Lee inventories the wrongs his exes have done against him, of not loving him enough, of racism and fetishization of his identity. But if there’s a thread here about white ssupremacy, Lee doesn’t really pull on it, even as he asks questions of the audience that start, “What does it feel like to…” One of these continues, “to be fucked so long by white supremacy that you start to like it?” An odd question to ask in the context of a show about a sexual desire formed by childhood media consumption.
There’s lights, and a pro-wrestler comes out—a heel, a bad guy, and beats Lee, taunting him about Bill Goldberg. He loves it. Another wrestler comes out, a face, a good guy, and he beats the heel. Lee loves it. He seems to delight in these turns of events, which is ultimately a self-pleasure: it is his show, he has planned and ordered all of it. This goes on. Then they kind of team up on Lee and leave him. Lee says he makes every iteration of the show different to “keep it live,” well, that’s a shit theory of liveness. And it’s a tell that Lee hasn’t seriously engaged with the discourses and traditions he’s positioned himself in. A leatherman shows up and puts Lee in a safety harness before putting him into rope bondage, first a chest harness, then a hogtie.
None of this is artful. Lee has no stage presence. For the first part of the show, he stands at a podium positioned next to a projection screen and he is upstaged by the screen. The microphone isn’t positioned properly, and he has to lean over the podium towards it. I can see a purpose to self-effacing by leaning over, playing coy, though it makes for a weak start, but what purpose could upstaging yourself with the screen serve? There is no craft.
A haze machine runs. The four men attached to the ropes turn out to be opera singers, apparently one of the new elements this time. They sing—Bach. This is the only way Bach is worked into the show. And the singers, having been standing, waiting for an hour, then holding ropes in tension for half an hour, now exposed to haze, don’t sound great. Eight more “Goldberg Variation” men, planted in the audience, stand, strip, and spray perfume over the heads of the audience before coming down to the stage. A stagehand brings them bottles of oil, and they oil themselves and each other up. They’re brought bottles of something—some white goo or uncolored slime—which they pour all over Clayton, now fully bound. Somewhere along here, the singing ends, well before the show reaches its intended climax. The leatherman drags Lee a few feet, trailing slime, and attaches him to two ropes, now lowered, to the hogtie and harness. The professional wrestlers, working the ropes from stage left among the lighting booms, hoist him into the air. None of this, of course, is surprising, as the safety harness and the ropes dangling above long indicated what would happen. The lights go dark. Applause. As the lights come back up and the audience begins to leave, one of the wrestlers appears with a tray of hot dogs, “free hot dogs!”
This is amateur work. The show runs 15 minutes longer than advertised. A real artist would have thought these things through, and set himself and his collaborators up for success. A real artist would rehearse (the second night chopped that extra time off). This kind of iteration might work for some artists, but it seems to have kept Lee from creating something worth our time
The Goldberg Variations ends as a self-indulgent spectacle lacking any of the things that make spectacle interesting. Even the professional wrestling in the show is boring. It has no heart, it has no soul. Lee is staging his romantic and sexual obsession and working through his hangups. In talks, Lee has noted, correctly, though apparently forgetting etiquette and crowd behavior, that the audience can leave at any time. If audiences have forgotten they have agency and can leave, it seems Lee has forgotten he has the agency to date other types of people, and instead made a whole show that involves the audience in his masochism. By following each performance with a talkback, ready to unpack and justify his choices, he seems to invite provocation, criticism and questions, embedding the audience deeper in his power play, while implying that the work does not speak for itself.
The difference between this and the worst fringe show you’ve ever seen is only one of resources and institutional legitimacy. The Goldberg Variations is an insult to the independent artists in the festival.
Saturday
I wanted to make a matinee of Dogberry and Verges are Scared, but with a deadline approaching and three tickets for the evening, I let my fear of not getting work done overtake my fear of missing out.
So I started the day’s fringe with a 6:30 pm showing of Fascist Groove. This was the second performance of a new work from Janine Renee Cunningham, built in collaboration with composer/performer/audio and video designer Matt O’Hare and director Mason Rosenthal. A punk lecture performance on punk and Thatcherism, this is a very accomplished piece. Little touches (that are actually quite big), like repositioning the desk (on which sits a pile of books on Thatcher, atop which sits a Karl Marx plush) that Cunningham sits at, keep the piece’s staging dynamic, something that lesser artists might neglect, and many do get away with, especially in a short piece.
Original songs by O’Hare punctuate Cunningham’s lecture, with O’Hare playing a teal Stratocaster and both of them singing. A pink guitar sits by, is it a backup, or tuned differently? She covers a history of early punk in the UK, grounding it the conditions of the people making it, that the point of punk wasn’t “the sound,” but something deeper. Projection design includes title slides framing sections of the lecture, band names, and archival footage. Clips of songs play, from very famous to not, there’s The Clash, sure but also Basement 5, Toxic Waste, The Exploited, Angelic Upstarts, The Mekons, the New Model Army, and many more. The music is good, both these clips and three original songs. As you might expect in a show about Thatcher, Reagan shows up. Cunningham and O’Hare don masks, and things get a little weird.
Something here reminds me of Adam Curtis, maybe in the way he draws out causal relationships between culture and politics, and the argument he’s made about the retreat from politics into culture, as Fascist Groove ends on a note about a pivot away from political music and toward bubblegum. Or maybe in form, this combination of music and lecture—and the Britishness of it all. But I think, like Adam Curtis, that the analysis feels a little broad when it talks about culture working back onto politics.
Cunningham tells me they plan to develop the piece further, that it wants to be a 75 minute piece—and I agree with their assessment. Ending with a rendition of X’s “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts,” Cunningham and O’Hare leave us with us a pessimistic vibe about putting our heads in the sand, but I think the argument in Fascist Groove isn’t fully made yet, especially with the closing turn to an American band. That second guitar is unplayed. Recommended. Continues September 23 at Asian Arts Initiative Black Box, 50 minutes.
Bradley Wrenn’s Red Sweater Chalupa is a swords and sorcery adventure with heaps of audience participation, including a choose-your-own-adventure segment. Wrenn combines a high fantasy dramatic vocal style with dumb fantasy names, nonsense werewolf-wizard war world building (say that three times fast), and a plot with just the right amount of holes. Red Sweater turns out to also be a dead parent show, leading Wrenn's werewolf prince on a mythic quest to come to grips with his loss. Very silly. What anchors this, and makes it work, of course, is Wrenn's dedicated performance and surprising vulnerability. Recommended. Continues September 18 at Pig Iron. 55 minutes.
Around a half hour later, I was seated for the work of Dumb Hub curator, Sarah Knittel: BEN FRANKLIN SEX PARTY. This is a wild time. Knittel comes out and asks if there’s any murderers in the house, and then if anyone feels like they could murder someone. A certain theater director in the audience raises his hand. Knittel hands a toy crossbow to someone in the center section and tells them they’ll know when to use it. She exits, and reappears as a mother, chained up, on the verge of execution and makes a prophecy. Then emerges as Ben Franklin, with a baldcap and yarn-hair (head, chest, and pubic) from a portal to check-in with the audience on the status of America’s democracy (not good, they report). Key founding fathers are introduced as high schoolers in a John Hughes movie, and Knittel leads the audience through a nation building exercise.
Our country for the evening is named by random objects (Mirror Glasses), and she solicits things we love (nature) and hate (liars) to build our country on. Most of the audience participation here is as a group, rather than as individuals, as the audience contributes to Mirror Glasses’s founding principles. As this unfolds, Knittel picks up a deranged sexual steam. The show reaches a climax, in more ways than one, with literal pornography set to Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game. There’s a syphilis outbreak, and Knittel’s Franklin turns out to be a tyrant, and it’s up to the audience to keep our republic, to paraphrase Franklin.
This is dumb chaos, and it’s a lot of fun, but it demands a lot of the audience. Not only with the democracy stuff, but that we should kiss. With the clock ticking well past ten, and having already seen two shows, I was pretty worn out toward the end and I was less engaged with Knittel’s chaos than I’d have liked to be, but at least two couples kissed. I think BEN FRANKLIN SEX PARTY is reaching for something it doesn’t quite achieve—not orgasm, not even a serious reflection on the nation’s problems, which Knittel admits to not being the person for during the show, but a certain cohesiveness between all of the disparate, wild bits. But that the ideas themselves are so wild, so outlandish and unhinged, and that they work at all is a testament to Knittel’s creativity and to her tireless and uninhibited performance. Recommended. Continues through September 20 at Pig Iron. 60 minutes.
Sunday
How much can you do with a cardboard box? If you're Selena Rook in Mon Carton (My Cardboard Box), quite a lot. This is as good as it gets in theater for the very young, and is an antidote for anyone in need of reconnecting with their sense of play and child-like discovery (which is to say, almost all of us). Highly Recommended. For 6 months and up. Continues September 28 at the Louis Bluver. 30 minutes.
El idioma de lo silenciado: The letters that were never sent is a project by Lucia Bedoya and Faysal Can Dakni, who are Columbian and Turkish, respectively. They met in 2016 at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, and this is their first piece together. This is a work in progress showing, after 2 weeks of development in Turkey.
Not much is spoken, until suddenly Dakni is performing Chekhov as Bedoya directs him in front of us. There's the ticking of a clock. There’s drinking. They sing a song together. A long red ribbon seems to mark both the distance and the entanglement between the two performers. An envelope becomes a beating heart.
Admittedly, this “experimental devised piece” lives in the world of things that I like, though I wouldn't class it as experimental work, rather that it’s the artists experimenting together. They said after the performance that there are no characters, and the four sections of the piece are unrelated scenes. The throughline, then, is that they're being played by the same two people, and that the connection between them is very real. Recommended, especially for those interested in physical theater, just don’t expect finished work. Continues through September 21 at the Proscenium at the Drake.
Catastrophe: A Beckettian Cabaret from Die-Cast, features the Samuel Beckett shorts Catastrophe, What Where, Cascando, and Ohio Impromptu, and knits between them with original songs (by Chris Sannino and Han Van Sciver) and devised movement inspired by Beckett’s life and work. The solid ensemble of Ross Beschler, Anthony Crosby, Keith Conallen, Kishia Nixon and Steven Wright join Sannino in playing toy instruments, there’s a whole section that uses music boxes. I was charmed by the space, the former bar Sugar Mom’s, tucked away in Old City in the basement of the old sugar refinery. This is a space so cool that I’m pissed it’s no longer a bar, despite no longer being a barfly myself. It’s now operated by Meg Saligman and the Ministry of Awe, who have been working to transform the nearby Manufacturer's National Bank (opening that space temporarily in 2023 for the FringeArts presented experience Make Bank).
I was also charmed by the opening song “Fair to the Middling Men,” which jauntily chronicles Beckett’s life as a young man in Paris, setting an energetic, optimistic tone which, appropriate for Beckett’s life and work, slowly transforms into something bleaker over the following hour. The original material also serves as a palette cleanser between the plays, of which the renditions of Catastrophe and Ohio Impromptu stand out as especially strong. Highly Recommended, if you’ll be able to catch it as it tours to Troy, NY with Troy Foundry Theatre, September 19—20 and the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, Provincetown, MA Sept 25—28. 50 minutes.
By the way, I’m looking for actors for a little project in November. You can find details here
The funniest show I will have seen.