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| 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.
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