An Up and Down Day at The Fringe With "Schooled," "Little One" and "Loose Canon"

Quentin Maré and Lilli Stein in Schooled

The New York International Fringe Festival prides itself on being eclectic. Which means you never know what you’re going to get when you attend one of its 200 or so productions, ranging from one-person shows to mini-musicals and performed at all levels of skill from shows ready-for-a-professional run to those that will be appreciated only by family members and very close friends.

As we’ve done over the past few summers, my theatergoing buddy Bill and I sorted through the list of the offerings, which play in rotation at venues around the East Village, and whittled them down to three whose descriptions intrigued both of us—and that we could comfortably see in one day.

Our mini-marathon started off with a winner: Schooled, a smart play by Lisa Lewis, who graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, spent six years in the movie business and sets her drama at a New York film school. 

Her three-hander focuses on Andrew (Quentin Maré), a one-time hot screenwriter now in his 50s who teaches there, and two of his young students, Claire (Lilli Stein), a talented working class girl from Atlantic City who’s writing an intimate family drama; and Jake (Stephen Friedrich), her equally talented but far more affluent boyfriend who writes in a more commercial vein.

When Claire seeks Andrew out for extra help with her script their working sessions become increasingly flirtatious even though he is married and she's thinking about moving in with Jake. Things get even more complicated when both Claire and Jake seek Andrew's recommendation for the same prestigious grant.

Aided by the sure-handed direction of James Kautz, the artistic director of the Amoralists Theatre Company, Lewis has created an engaging 90-minute piece that wrestles with art and ambition, class consciousness and gender politics. In the opening scene, the men fail to take Claire seriously, by the play's end, they have to.

Schooled, which has been picking up a lot of good word of mouth, is scheduled for two more performances, tomorrow and Thursday (you can check out the specific details by clicking here) but it’s worthy of a longer run and a much wider audience.

The next show we saw, Little One, will probably have more narrow appeal. Developed by the Alley Theatre in Vancouver, it’s an unsettling psychological thriller with two story lines that eventually converge, although not in the way you expect them to.

One plot centers on the marriage between a geeky white guy and his beautiful mail-order bride from Vietnam. The other focuses on a sibling relationship between an orphaned boy and an abandoned girl who are adopted by a well-meaning couple.

The boy Aaron overcompensates and becomes a star athlete, straight-A student and obedient son. The girl Claire makes a less successful adjustment; she throws tantrums, kills the family pets and behaves, even as a child, in sexually inappropriate ways.

Much of both these tales is relayed by a now grown-up Aaron, who speaks directly to the audience, although some of his memories are illustrated with short, pungent scenes between him and Claire.

I’ll confess I’m not exactly sure what playwright Hannah Moscovitch wants us to take away from this 60-minute tone poem but director Amiel Gladstone has created a suitably creepy atmosphere and Marisa Emma Smith and Daniel Arnold do a fine job of portraying the perverse allure of a psychopath and the helplessness of those related to her.

I can’t say that I liked this show but I will that say that it continues to haunt me. You’ve got three more chances (on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday) to see—and judge—it for yourself.

Loose Canon, the last show we saw, also has three more performances but I can’t recommend it. The show attempts to combine a critique of consumerist society with a satirical look at the theatrical canon, stretching from Sophocles to Mamet.

But the humor here turns out to be the kind of sophomoric fare that goes down best after a couple of glasses of cheap beer. “Oh Roku, Roku. What’s Tivo  worth if not for you,” goes a line in the not-as-funny-as-it-thinks-it-is Shakespeare takeoff; meanwhile, the homage to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is set not on a debt-burdened Russian estate but in a sales-challenged Taco Bell.

The performances don’t help. The six-member cast, several of whom seem to be recent graduates of Tufts University, as is the show’s director, is game but too variously talented. Still, a lively crowd of supporters, including the proud grandmother of one of the actors, cheered them on loudly at the performance Bill and I saw. 

And, of course, that’s the thing about the Fringe; there’s something for everyone.

A Personal Postscript on This Year's Fringe

When I finished last Saturday’s post, I thought I was done with this year’s New York International Fringe Festival. But then I got an email from a friend inviting me to see a show directed by his daughter Anna Strasser. So yesterday I went to see Chemistry, a two-hander by Jacob Marx Rice about the relationship between a couple who meet cute while waiting outside a psychopharmacologist's office to get prescriptions for their meds. 

Jamie (Jonathan Hopkins) has been newly diagnosed with a manic-obsessive disorder.  Steph (Lauren LaRocca) is a longstanding depressive. They are, as Steph says, “A pair so perfect they named a disease after us.”

It wouldn’t be fair for me to review this show since I have a relationship with Strasser's dad but I can say that Chemistry has been so popular that the festival administrators added an extra performance this week (the final one scheduled for Friday is already sold out) and have selected the show for its Encore series of productions that have drawn the strongest word of mouth (click here to read what one reviewer said). 

And although it might be flirting a bit close with the conflict-of-interest line, I’m also going to say that if you can, you should make an effort to see it.

Youth, Love and Sex at This Year's Fringe

Every spring I tell myself I should see the end-of-school productions at Juilliard or New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts so that I can get a peek at the newest crop of talented hopefuls ready to storm the theater world.  Inevitably, other things come up and I end up not going. But a visit to this year’s New York International Fringe Festival has given me the chance to make up for that.

The Fringe is always filled with young up-and-comers hoping for their big break. Yet I had almost skipped it too because, as always, it's so difficult choosing what to see when 200 shows are running at 18 different venues from Aug. 8 to Aug 24. But my undaunted theatergoing buddy Bill valiantly sorted through the offerings and came up with a trio of shows for us to see in one day of marathon theatergoing.

 Two of the three—Vestments of the Gods and The Picture (of Dorian Gray)—featured fresh-faced casts and left me admiring the intensity of their young actors' energy and unbridled commitment to their craft, even if I wasn’t swept away by the shows themselves.

Vestments of the Gods, a musical that lists Lin-Manuel Miranda as a producer, uses Sophocles’ Antigone as a jumping off point. Here the principled young woman daring to go up against the establishment is Annie, a sixth grader at Thebes Street Elementary School, and the cause she’s fighting for is an end to bullying, particularly of the effeminate boy who is her best friend.  

The book writer Owen Panettieri works hard to create modern-day cognates for the characters in the original story—Ismene, Antigone’s more compliant sister, becomes Ms. Mene, the school teacher who looks the other way when the bullying occurs; Tiresias, the soothsayer in the Greek version becomes, a bit more improbably, Terry, the truth-telling janitor at the school. 

But Panettieri isn’t able to add anything to the tale beyond the obvious message that bullying is bad and so his show carries the whiff of an old-style public service announcement. A program note says the music by David Carl was added late in the development process.  It’s pleasant, if undistinguished, but the lyrics, also by Panettieri, don’t say much about the characters singing them or move the plot along.

Still the cast is game. Erica Diaz does a fine job as the noble Annie, stage vet Jennifer Cody seems to be having a good time as the school’s narrow-minded PTA president and although the eight actors who make up this show’s Greek chorus are a decade older than the grade schoolers they're playing, they are energetic and sing well. 

Vestments of the Gods, which is scheduled for three more performances at Theatre 80 on St. Marks Place, is unlikely to have much of an afterlife but some of its eager young cast members may.

The odds that the five comely actors in The Picture (of Dorian Gray) may have careers seem even stronger. The three men and two women apparently all come from Juniata College, a small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania that prides itself on its science program, and they’re almost vibrating with the desire to show how much theater matters.

Their show takes a highly-stylized approach to Oscar Wilde’s classic novella about a hedonist who trades his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Neal Utterback is listed as the adapter and director and he has the actors, all dressed in androgynous jeans and white t-shirts, pass the characters around irrespective of gender. The change is signaled when an actor puts on one of the distinctive pairs of sunglasses that symbolize each role.  

A narrator periodically recites Wilde's prose. The actors sometimes speak in unison. They also perform choreographed movements and sing snatches of contemporary songs chosen to underscore telling moments in the story. Bill found it all to be a bit too precious. And the story can be difficult to follow if you come to it new. But I'm a sucker for this kind of flamboyant stagecraft.

 

Watching these young actors, particularly the eyecatching Jamison Monella, reminded me of my own acting class days when my fellow students and I felt that we didn’t need props or costumes to make a show but just passion. You can catch a similar spirit on display at The Steve & Marie Sgouros Theatre on MacDougal Street, where The Picture (of Dorian Gray) is slated for four more performances, including one today.

And yet, contrary to the up-with-youth theme of this post, the show that both Bill and I like most was Bedroom Secrets, a two hander about middle-aged people written and directed by Thomas and Judy Heath, the husband-and-wife team whose previous play Perfectly Normel People won the festival’s Audience Award last year. 

 

The set-up for Bedroom Secrets is simple: a therapist listens to and tries to help the sexual problems of a series of clients. The therapist is played by Ashlie Atkinson, who made a terrific debut nine years ago as the overweight title character in Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig but hasn’t done much in New York since then. I hope this production changes that because she’s a marvelously genuine and sympathetic actor.

All five of the clients—male and female—are played by Stephen Wallem, who will be familiar to TV watchers as the male nurse Thor on Edie Falco’s Showtime series “Nurse Jackie.” Wallem's stage credits seem to be mainly musicals and concerts but he does a very nice job here, moving in just a beat from character to character, aided only by a simple prop—a water bottle, a cellphone, some neck wear—to distinguish each. 

 

The play’s underlying message is that all of us—gay or straight, single or married, young or not so young—want to be loved. That’s not exactly original but it’s sweetly told and just the kind of show that budget-minded regional theaters might appreciate. But New Yorkers will have to rush to see it because there’s only one more performance scheduled and it’s tonight at the Players Theatre on MacDougal.

There are however lots of other Fringe performances to see over the next week and a half and you can check them all out here.

A Surprisingly Satisfying Day at the Fringe

Unless a friend, relative or lover is doing one of its shows, deciding what to see at the New York International Fringe Festival can be daunting.  Not to mention disappointing. There are nearly 200 shows each year, ranging in quality from polished professionalism to flagrant narcissism. In the past I’ve either thrown up my hands and skipped the festival entirely or chosen haphazardly and then wish that I had skipped it. 

But I got smart this year and about a month ago, I enlisted the help of my intrepid theatergoing buddy Bill, who read through this year’s offerings (click here to do the same) checked out the early buzz on them and then made up a short list of candidates that we might want to see. Luckily, three of the shows that most intrigued us were playing on the same day and so this past Wednesday, Bill and I created our own mini-festival and for the first time ever I can say I had a great time at the Fringe.

All of the Fringe shows play at theaters downtown within walking distance of one another, which makes it easy to get from one to the other.  Bill and I started our day at 2 p.m. at the Gene Frankel Theatre with Pink Milk, a 90-minute meditation on the life of Alan Turing, the brilliant computer scientist and cryptologist who helped the Brits break the German code during World War II but later committed suicide after being prosecuted for gross indecency because he was gay when that was illegal in England.

The show's playwright Alex Paul Young and his seven-member cast are all current college students or recent grads and both the play and the performances reflect their youth. And Pink Milk doesn’t add much to our understanding of Turing beyond what Hugh Whitemore offered in his 1986 play Breaking the Code, which introduced Turing to the general public and gave Derek Jacobi his West End debut.

Still, there is a sweet earnest to Pink Milk that flows from a new generation’s delight in having discovered a martyr and hero.  And director Brandon Powers has gussied up the production with all kinds of stagecraft, including stylized dance routines and some symbolic business with apples. He slightly overdoes it but I wouldn’t mind seeing more from him—or from Young for that matter. And, if you hurry, you can see what they’ve done with this since there’s a performance tonight and one more on Sunday afternoon.

Our next show, Independents, was scheduled to start at 4 p.m. and so Bill and I scooted up Second Avenue to Theatre 80 on St. Mark’s Place. There was a great deal of interest in this musical because its book writer Marina Keegan was killed in an auto accident in May, just days after graduating from Yale and a few weeks before she was scheduled to start working as an assistant at The New Yorker (click here to read more about her).

Her collaborators and fellow Yalies, composer Stephen Feigenbaum, lyricist Mark Sonnenblick and director Charlie Polinger, have dedicated the show to Keegan’s memory and it turns out to be a very nice tribute. 

The plot centers around a group of young misfits who are living on a Revolutionary- era tall ship that is the only thing one of them inherited when his parents unexpectedly died. He and his crew try to raise the money to pay off some debt on the boat by performing as Colonial Williamsburg-style reenactors.  But they’re no good at it until a Corky St. Clair-style intern arrives.

There are additional subplots involving a brother in foster care, at least two troubled romances and drug smugglers that Keegan might have combed out and tightened had she lived. But as is, the show is buoyed up by its terrific score—an entertaining blend of pop-rock tunes, riffs on sea ditties and a lovely cabaret-ready ballad, “I Should Be Glad He’s Gone.” 

Polinger meanwhile has directed with a sure hand. The cast—a mix of vets from the original Yale production and young New York actors including Lilli Cooper, the original Martha in Spring Awakening who sings the hell out of that “He’s Gone” ballad—comes with varying degrees of talent but is so thoroughly natural and comfortable with one another that I thought they’d all been longtime friends until I read the Playbill. Kudos to both Polinger and casting director Holly Buczek.

The production values are similarly strong. The handsome nautical set by Brian Dudkiewicz reminded Bill and me of the one for Peter and the Starcatcher and appropriately so since this show is not only set on a ship but deals with a contemporary group of lost boys and girls. 

Independents is scheduled for three more performances next week before the whole Fringe Festival closes on Aug. 26.  The word is that all seats for it were sold out but there were a few vacant ones at our performance so go and you might get lucky.

It began to rain when Bill and I walked out of the theater and since we had an hour until our 7 p.m. show, we ducked into a café on Second Avenue and got a quick snack. When the rain slowed, we ran over to the Kraine Theater on 4th Street, where we saw the most professional of the three shows, Tail! Spin!, Mario Correa’s satirical spin on political sex scandals.

Excerpting verbatim transcripts from press conferences, interviews, emails and other public utterances, Correa revisits former Sen. Larry Craig’s arrest for lewd conduct in a men's airport bathroom, former Rep. Mark Foley’s salacious email exchanges with teen boys, former Gov. Mark Sanford’s extramarital affair with an Argentinean journalist and former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s sexting and emailing of lewd photos of himself. 

The fun derives from the way Correa juxtaposes the words each man said as he tried to control the damage after his alleged indiscretions had been revealed. Veteran comedy director Dan Knechtges brings a light but deft touch to the proceedings in which the actors sit on stools and occasionally refer to the scripts they carry. Video projections help the audience keep track of who’s speaking.

The shamed pols are played by a terrific quarter of actors who’ve honed their comedic skills on TV and onstage: Sean Dugan as Craig, Dan Hodapp as Foley, Mo Rocca as Sanford and Nate Smith as Weiner  But best of all is  “Saturday Night Live’s” Rachel Dratch, who, as the Playbill notes, plays the men’s “wives, tails, beards & Barbara Walters” and is LOL-funny as each. 

Bill and I caught the next-to-the-last performance of Tail! Spin! but it wouldn’t have mattered even if I’d told you about it earlier because all of the seats sold out as soon as the tickets went on sale last month.

So, we did three plays in six hours. None was perfect but they were good enough that I would have been up for even another.

Forgoing the Fringe

I could blame it on the fact that I live on the Upper West Side and most of the shows for the New York International Fringe Festival are all the way downtown. Or I could fess up to the fact that while I can appreciate simple staging (shout out to David Cromer’s Our Town) I have an admittedly snobbish preference for shows with more polished production values. Or I could even invoke the tropical weather that has caused my favorite activity this past week to be lolling on the terrace—a glass of crisp rosé in one hand, my new Kindle in the other (I’ve been having a dandy time clicking through “Supporting Player," Richard Seff’s memoir of being an actor and agent in the Golden Age of Broadway during the 1950s and 1960s and I wish more theater-related books were available for downloading).

But the truth of the matter is that we're one week into the Fringe Festival and I haven't seen any of its shows because there are simply too many of them for me. Deciding which ones to see is too much of a crapshoot: with snake eyes likely to be more common than boxcars. So I’ve contented myself with reports and reviews about the festival. The invaluable nytheater.com has reviews—or previews—of all 201 shows (click here to read them). The New York Times chimed in yesterday, focusing mainly, although not solely, on a 75-minute revival of the 1967 musical How Now, Dow Jones (click here for that). But if you’re still trying to decide what to see, then your best bet might be the list the helpful folks at Critic-O-Meter have put together, grading the most talked-about shows of the festival (click here to check it out).

So go (there's a whole week left) enjoy yourself (tickets are generally around $15) and if you don’t run into me at any of them, know that I’ll be toasting your adventurousness.