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SF Fringe Festival 2000

Review in SF Weekly by Joe Mader & Michael Scott Moore

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Fringiness
Notes toward a different kind of Fringe
By Michael Scott Moore and Joe Mader

According to gossip, the four
members of a troupe called
Banana, Bag, and Bodice moved
away from San Francisco last
year because of rising rents. They
fled to New York. They're
currently back in town to put on a
show at the Fringe Festival, but
for them the cost of living seems
to be slightly lower back east.

Rising rent, and limited space -- as
no one in the San Francisco
theater scene needs to be told -- is
a problem for almost everyone
hoping to put on a play, so this
year, the Fringe Festival ought be
more important than ever. For a
low fee the local producer, the
Exit's Christina Augello, offers
promotion and space to 50 or 60
individual shows. You'd think
small theater troupes would leap at
this chance to experiment with
new material in front of an
automatic audience (opening-night
ticket sales were up 11 percent
this year), but the tone is still more
Fringey than really experimental.
"Fringey" implies lots of magic,
comedy, and overall weirdness
that seems unique to the festival,
as opposed to envelope-pushing
theater. Nothing wrong with Fringiness. Everyone expects it. Some
acts do nothing but tour the world's Fringe festivals. But I did expect
the local real estate market to change the festival's tone a little more
than it has.

Take the Banana, Bag, and Bodice show, inexplicably named Number
2, which seems to be a pale rip-off of a Beckett play (say, Endgame
or Godot). It features a serving boy on stilts, a cantankerous boss on
a ladder (who mumbles nonsense and eats porridge from a bucket),
and two clowns stomping around the stage in a mess of coat
hangers, cotton balls, and pornographic playing cards. You can't ask
for a better definition of Fringiness. It's lively and fun, now and then,
but I assume B, B, & B came back to San Francisco because the
troupe had nothing else to do in New York. If you can do absolutely
anything at the Fringe, why not a serious one-act? Why not a dry-run
of that play you've been writing? Who enforces Fringiness, exactly?
And how does an anarchistic free-for-all get to feel so weirdly
conformist?

Just wondering. -- Michael Scott Moore

10 Kevin Augustine's stunning, mysterious play has the strange
beauty of a David Lynch movie and its own skewed, desperate
vision. Augustine wrote, directed, built the puppets, and performs this
enigmatic version of the Frankenstein story, assisted onstage by two
gifted puppeteers, Jane Catherine Shaw and Carol Binion. Andrew
(Augustine) awaits his fiancee on his wedding day; she fails to
appear. Andy subsumes his pain in a plan to create a man who can
dance to Tchaikovsky. He enters a strange contest for "Creators,"
others who are attempting the same thing as him, some who've
achieved acclaim for their results and who arouse his envy. Andy's
creature, the puppet Daniel, begins to take form -- his haggard,
misshapen face, his scarred, patchwork body -- but his legs cause
Daniel too much pain to dance as his progenitor has planned, and
Andy despairs. As he lies on the floor in pain, certain he's failed,
Daniel begins to dance, and the moment is overwhelming. 10 is a
great and terrible fable about art and love. (J.M.)

Angry Jellow Bubbles -- The Revenge In Eva Minemar's free-form
show from New York, six women -- all of them young and alluring --
talk for an hour about their bodies. It's not exactly improv, because
the performers mount the stage with a good idea of what they're
about to say; but it's also not anything else. Some routines are angry,
like Olivia Singer's witty laceration of the Botox trend. Other routines
are interesting, like Sigalit Ben Yehuda's discussion of her Orthodox
Jewish family's attitude toward body exposure; or funny, like Tracy
Tobin's impersonation of her own skin complaining about the sun.
But other segments are sophomoric, like the parodies of pop songs
the women sing in the first segment. Minemar seems to build the
show around her performers' personal beauty-insecurities, and as
long as the women are funny and frank, it's reminiscent of the better
Vagina Monologues. (M.S.M.)

Breton's Dream Sean Owens' smart and funny treatment of the
surrealists gets a rather messy production from director Lisa Giglio
and the Center for Imaginary Solutions. The show, with an
eight-member troupe and an unwieldy set piece, is too large for the
Exit Stage Left playing area. But the main problem is the uneven cast.
Michael Stubblefield in the title role has no shape or energy: His Andre
Breton remains blurry and indistinct. Thank God for Christopher
Kuckenbaker's hilarious turns as Max Ernst ("The Nazis are Man
Ray's iron," he proclaims, referring to the famed dadaist flatiron with
protruding nails in its underside) and Salvador Dali. Kathryn Wood's
costumes put the actors in underwear and garters, with witty
accessories delineating the various roles. Owens and his cohorts are
on to something here: With more crispness and polish, Breton's
Dream could be great theater. (J.M.)

My Penis -- In and Out of Trouble Antonio Sacre returns to the
Fringe after last year's Black and Brown and White All Over with a
piece that will polarize audiences. A strangely subdued Sacre sits in
an armchair with hundreds of snapshots spread out on the floor
around him. He picks up one picture and begins a gentle, humorous
recitation of his sexual history. Sacre is funny, playful, and charming,
even when dealing with the seamier side of sex, such as his first trip
to the doctor to be treated for VD, or the time he slept with a stripper
at her boyfriend's house. And then his story turns horrific --
appallingly, staggeringly so. The shock is brutal, abrupt -- which is
exactly Sacre's intention. He isn't merely performing here, he's
lecturing, confessing, haranguing, exposing, even assaulting. He tears
the audience wide open, shattering the distance between it and
himself. Is this show Art? No. But it's brutally effective. (J.M.)

Run Jenny An Oakland theater troupe called Bay Stage works against
the mood of the Fringe by offering a realistic drama set in the
antebellum South. Run Jenny is about a Northern woman named
Henrietta Hunt who moves to a Southern town called Willow Springs.
She upsets things there by encouraging the local slaves to escape, and
later stands trial for killing her husband. The story has passion,
suspense, and a powerful twist, but playwright Michael Thomas
Tower casts it in the most awkward form possible for a play. Instead
of watching what happens, we hear about it secondhand. John
Buchanan is earnest and well-paced as the gently defiant apothecary;
Tower himself plays the grave Southern judge with authority. But
other acting is uneven (although Mahasin Islam delivers an excellent
final speech as Jenny), and the show as a whole seems to walk stiffly
when it wants to run. (M.S.M.)

Stew The sleeper hit of the 2000 Fringe might be Cameron
Galloway's Stew, featuring the hapless, neurotic, fragile, sentimental,
romantic-liberal idealist Eustencia Charity, who does a cooking show.
She wants to emphasize that all food -- notably the chicken in her pan
-- was once alive, and should be thanked in some way before the
meal. Eustencia's weird behavior causes friction with her director, a
disembodied male voice she happens to have married. The friction
drives her to the comforts of various personalities, including her
therapist, her shotgun-wielding sister, Noam Chomsky, and an
adoring mango. Chomsky (Terry Lamb) makes a hilarious appearance
on the TV show in an apron, theorizing about paella; later Eustencia
dances with a giant cob of corn. Her capacity for building major
crises from trifles, and acting put-upon in a squeaky voice, is what
makes Eustencia so much fun to watch. Strong performances by
Lamb, Cynthia Bassham, and Megan Blue Stermer offset weaker
performances by Michael Carreiro and Adrian Elfenbaum; the show
generally feels pointless when Eustencia isn't onstage. (M.S.M.)

Theatre/Plague Artaud wrote, "The theater, like the plague, is a crisis
which is resolved by death or cure." Also: "We cannot go on
prostituting the idea of theater whose only value is its excruciating
relationship to reality, and magic, and danger." The Frenchman was
pretentious enough on his own, but Atomic Elroy, in Theatre/ Plague,
only makes him worse. Elroy sits onstage in a straitjacket and a
cardboard dunce cap, with an incongruous headset to amplify his
voice, and alternately mouths long quotations from Artaud or does
weird shit while Artaud-quotations flow muddily over a speaker
system. And on opening night, when Elroy lit incense in the close hot
room, then poked the burning stick through the top of his dunce cap,
and had to pluck it out to keep his hair from burning -- this was the
opium-smoking scene -- it became time for me to leave. (M.S.M.)

Trailer Trash Tabloid This uproarious Florida import features the
survivors and descendants of victims of a 1964 tornado telling their
stories on the Lamont Lazarus tabloid TV show. See, when the
twister flattened the "New Drawl City Mobile Home Village &
Putt-Putt Golf" in South Georgia, killing most of the inhabitants, the
Village's owner, Velveeta magnate "Happy Frank" Forkenberg, also
wound up dead, but from a shotgun blast to the head. Actors Michael
Wanzie and Doug Ba'aser play a variety of roles in outrageous
costumes (by Skip Stewart). As Delilah Forkenberg -- Happy Frank's
widow, who survived the disaster by hiding in a barbecue smoker --
Wanzie sports a phallic red beehive do and a collar of black and red
feathers. As Rhoda Schuster, the trailer park love child, Wanzie has
Shirley Temple curls, polka dots, and a lisp. As Doug Snood, inbred
and missing teeth, Ba'aser delivers the goods on the park's suspected
"lesbanese" inhabitant, Ethel-Mae Hyde-Park (Ba'aser again), who
resents the implication that she looks like Janet Reno. Director/writer
Lewis Routh's script is perfectly constructed; every detail pays off in
unexpected ways. As one character says, "Her blond hair flowed
down her shoulder like chicken gravy over mashed potatoes, and I
thought, "Damn, I'm hungry.'" (J.M.)

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