Love you Love you Love You, The Van Gogh Shogh
veteran clowns Sarah Sanford and Donna Oblongata deliver
Love you Love you Love you
by Sarah Sanford
directed by Alex Tatarsky
Continuing at Christ Church Neighborhood House September 27, 28, and 29
Highly Recommended
A surreal journey into the surreality of dementia, Sarah Sanford paints a personal and quietly heartbreaking portrait of motherhood in her return to the stage after 9 years away. Features the finest crowd work I've seen in this year's festival.
“Did you come to see someone?” Sanford asks the crowd, discovering the audience. It’s a question that gets repeated over the show and becomes a little more frightening each time. Not in the horror movie kind of way, of course, but in the quiet existential sad-terror of dementia, the and loss of self and awareness that this show explores. She discovers the prop table, staged visibly, and explores its contents. There’s Life Savers (“Maybe later” she says impishly). The discoveries are joy filled, until they’re that something else. A phone rings and she can’t find it to answer it. Out of her bag she produces another bag. She produces Matryoshka, Russian nesting dolls, and inside the final one is a nip of gin. There’s a landline telephone in the bag. There’s a children’s book about Baba Yaga that she can recall parts of. The logic is out of joint.
Sanford transforms utterly from this aging mother, to a younger version of her mother—and it’s unclear if we’re in memory or in the past, and this younger character charms the crowd: “Are there artists here?” She references Anne Sexton. She shares Life Savers. She transforms again into herself, mothering her child, Jesse Sugg—who also becomes a surrogate for Sanford-as-child—and also into Baba Yaga, with a long wig and gold teeth. She reads to him from the book, in the one scene that I think doesn’t work—it’s the reading itself that’s an issue—from the Baba Yaga picture book. But the story is not that of Baba Yaga, it’s about a curse that steals a person from themselves, and the hero of the story, a child, who must enter the forest to challenge it. There’s a scene in a kitchen that magically exits onto a beach. A simple phrase is repeated, distorted a little each time, until it becomes word salad. This is a brave show, both in the braveness of Sanford’s performance enact such difficult and personal material, but also to be so vulnerable with us about her mother and this most challenging of losses. At the show’s conclusion, Sanford, again as Baba Yaga, has created a nest for herself, and told us there’s nothing she can do about the dementia. In this moment, the slippage between Sanford, her mother, and the monstrous witch is at its most productive, both brutal and touching.
The Van Gogh Shogh
By Donna Oblongata
Directed by Francesca Montanile Lyons
At Deep End Studios on September 24 and 25, though not actually part of Philly Fringe (it was a 2023 entry). In Jersey City, NJ at Art House (right off the PATH) September 27 to 29.
Highly Recommended
If Love you Love you Love you had the finest crowd work in the festival, I make that claim in part because The Van Gogh Shogh is not part of the Philly Fringe, though the nature of Donna Oblongata’s crowd work as Vincent f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶G̶r̶u̶b̶H̶u̶b̶ van Gogh is a totally different beast (I was offered a beer in the show’s opening minutes). A romp through the trials of making art, Van Gogh Shogh makes only a little use of its meta-framing device, being set within a van Gogh “immersive experience,” but generates its own immersive qualities as a bizzaro sip and paint for a few audience members.
Oblongata is wild and raucous as van Gogh, and is here to talk about the various pain of being an artist, not only romanticized artistic suffering, but the arduousness of asking for money and selling your work. The show lags towards the end, concluding its 75+ minute run-time (including a long karaoke number) with an art auction. “If my paintings are masterpieces, how come I’m still broke?” van Gogh asks us, but in staging an auction of his own—of his impromptu student’s work—I’m not sure if the critique embodied by the form, that living artists don’t get any profit from auction sales either, lands. Van Gogh’s biography is glanced at here for comic purposes, not tragic ones, but the pathos is there underlying everything.
Oblongata pulls off brilliant bits soliciting the crowd for help in writing a letter to Theo van Gogh, Vincent’s younger brother and art dealer, to ask for money, and playing van Gogh’s parents straight and supportive against Vincent’s difficult personality, especially after he returns, love-lorn over his cousin and complaining about the level of support some of his (then) more-famous peers received from their parents. Oblongata’s van Gogh alternates unpredictably between coy, shocked-and-thrilled to be so famous and successful, and a cynical, knowing artist. It’s a clever mix that makes for top notch clowning and a very enjoyable night at the theater.
My agenda this weekend includes: The Listeners, the US premiere of a new opera by Missy Mazzoli and Royce Varek in a co-presentation between FringeArts and Opera Philadelphia (tickets are pay-what-you-will, as low as $11), Kelly Bond & Ellery Burton’s Fuzzy Bulldozer on the advice of Ellen Chenoweth of Solid Seam, and I’m finally getting to Chris Davis’s 40-Year-Old Ballerino.
I have some time in my agenda on Saturday, send me your picks for the afternoon? I’m (morbidly) curious about BODYSHOP, at DIY space Cambria House, which features the worst artist bio I’ve ever read.
Amando Hauser has one more show tonight as DeliaDelia! The Flat Chested Witch! I’m missing this one, but I’ve seen some of the DeliaDelia material in bits and pieces and the hour is sure to be fun.
The next couple editions of this newsletter will cover these and more, catching up on what I’ve seen during Fringe and didn’t have time to write about before it closed.