Jill's PLAF Diary for Friday, September 1-Sunday, September 3

Performances: By Grimm (part of Vagabond Acting Troupe’s Journeys to the Edge) (Future performances); Austentatious (11th Hour Theatre Company) (Future performances); The Guided Tour (Kaibutsu) (Future performances); Granuaile and a Place at Howth (SAOIRSE Celtic Performance Troupe) (No future performances); Cell (Headlong Dance Theater) (All future performances sold out); Cell: Movement in Restricted Spaces (Group Motion Dance Company) (Future performances); Every Day Above Ground (SaBooge) (No future performances); Flip the Script (The Brick Playhouse) (Future performances); Suburban Love Songs (Karen Getz) (Future performances).

Whew! Nine shows in three days. And I’d thought covering the Film Fest was tough… I’ve gotta say, though, when you’re feeling down, surrounding yourself with live performances isn’t a bad way to pick yourself up again. I’m taking Monday off from PLAF to decompress, but I’ve still got another dozen or so shows to pack in over the next two weeks, so keep reading!

By Grimm
There’s a difference between liking something and appreciating it for what it is. For instance, when I go to a cocktail party and I see strawberries dipped in chocolate and painted to look like they’re wearing tuxedos, I appreciate the effort that went into each one. My appreciation for the art, however, isn’t going to make me like chocolate. In retrospect, that’s kind of how I felt about By Grimm. Don’t get me wrong, the show is excellent. The cast trained extensively in Grotowski technique before mounting this production, and it shows. Everything they do is transparent: you can see the technique that goes into each step, each line. Both the movement and vocal work was great, and the versatile cast kept the show going at a steady clip, so the hour passed quite quickly. Just because most of the show wasn’t my personal aesthetic (I was more entertained by “Hans and Gretel” than by the main plot), doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a good show. My recommendation: make up your own mind.
Festival Rating: Good to Very Good.

Austentatious
As much as I’m all about experimental theatre, novel performance pieces, etc, I also have to admit, with great frequency, that I’m a huge musical theatre fan. Musicals, at least of the traditional sort, are very rare in the world of PLAF. In fact, now that that I think of it, this is the first musical that I’ve ever seen at the Fringe. And even though it didn’t fit into most of the notions of what belongs at Fringe, it was a great show from start-to-finish. The general plot is that a small community theatre is trying to mount a new adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, written by the woman that the director is sleeping with, who, not coincidentally, also ends up playing Elizabeth Bennet. The songs aren’t part of Pride and Prejudice, they’re actually being sung backstage by the (very talented) cast. Anybody who’s performed in live theatre, especially musical theatre, will recognize the characters in the show: the diva, the princess, the newbie. The director reminded me so much of a former director of mine that I could hardly contain myself during the tech week scenes—I definitely found myself laughing when nobody else was, because of the familiarity of the situation. I’m not sure that non-theatre people will get as much out of this piece as my companion and I did—an entire song, for instance is composed of the titles of other plays—but the audience on Friday night was filled with members of Philly’s theatre community and friends of the cast and crew, so the house was positively filled with people who “got it.” Lucky, lucky cast.
Festival Rating: Very Good to Excellent.

The Guided Tour
I stood out in the rain in front of the Betsy Ross House for twenty minutes while the cast and crew of The Guided Tour worked out some technical difficulties. Seeing as the performance venue was a tourist trolley, there wasn’t exactly a lobby for us to stand in. Fortunately, it was warmer than it had been the night before, and the rain and wind had both let up a good amount, so nobody was too annoyed at the wait. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this piece, once we were all settled inside. Was the cast going to be perfectly in character and treat this like a normal tour till something went wrong? The answer was actually no. Sean Roach, the “tour guide” (on whom I’d developed a little crush by the end of the “tour”) began by introducing himself and the cast and driver and explaining what we were about to see. The Guided Tour is an autobiographical narrative written by Bruce Walsh that really holds nothing back, makes no attempts at disguising. Roach’s tour guide was named Bruce. It doesn’t get more honest than that. The tour begins legitimately enough, touring through Old City and Chinatown, then making half a lap around City Hall. Roach alternates between charming tour guide, dealing with annoying passengers (played by Ryder Thornton and Alexis Brie Wildau) and more contemplative monologist. As the performance progresses, his reveries are disrupted by more characters played by Thornton and Wildau, including an annoying English boss, a very assertive doctor, a Pentecostal minister, and a ukulele-playing, possibly mad, woman known as “Legwarmers.” These characters are there more and more as Bruce is less and less in control of his life. Suddenly, you’re on Point Breeze Avenue. This isn’t where the trolley is supposed to run. The people on the street recognize this, and look into the trolley with confusion. And your tour guide might be spiraling toward a nervous breakdown. I thoroughly enjoyed The Guided Tour, and it wasn’t till after I disembarked the trolley (safely in front of the Betsy Ross House, where we’d boarded) and began to walk home that I realized how sad the whole thing really was. That’s not a bad thing; in fact, it’s probably a good one. Because at the writing of this diary entry, I’m nearly twenty-four hours away from the experience, and I’m still thinking about it.
Festival rating: Very Good to Excellent.

Granuaile and a Place at Howth
How many bad Irish accents can you fit into one production? Well, let’s see… how many people were in the cast of Granuaile? I’d wanted to like this production. I really had. There were pirates, and step dancing! Unfortunately, I just couldn’t get over the production to appreciate these things very much. I enjoyed the dance that took up the first five minutes of the show, but it was all pretty much downhill from there. The program indicated that there would be no intermission between the first and second acts; what we had instead was the world’s longest set change followed by an additional five minutes of sitting in the dark, during which the actors shout-whispered to the musicians to keep playing. Somebody missed a cue, and how. The casting was inappropriate, the acting halfhearted, and the background “acting” hilarious (but not in a good way). The cast was obviously having fun. It’s just that the audience wasn’t.
Festival rating: Poor.

Cell
I waited on the Market Street Overpass at the honeycomb for what seemed forever, but in reality it was only about ten minutes. My phone rang, I was told that I would be called Buzz. It was clear that somehow, somebody could see me. (“Look over to your left. No, a little more.”) I was given an assignment. And all of a sudden I was walking around Old City, unsure of my destination, always waiting for the next phone call, the next seemingly unassuming person who was actually “in” on everything. It was kind of like Mission: Impossible, with dancers. The show is completely sold out (even with 230 show times—each performance is for one person only). This was an amazing, full-immersion piece of performance, and not for the shy or faint of heart. If you were in Old City on Saturday evening between 6:40 and 7:40 and you saw a girl in a trench coat dancing down the street between two gentlemen in yellow, that was me. And I wish the same experience to you all. Go ahead, dance down the street: even though the run is sold out, there’s really nothing stopping you from doing it on your own.
Festival rating: Excellent.

Cell: Movement in Restricted Spaces
Going to see two shows with “Cell” in their title back-to-back proved a little confusing for me, and has apparently proved confusing to many people who’ve showed up at one, expecting the other. This Cell was quite different from the other, however. I’d like to say, first of all, that the Broad Street Ministry at 320 South Broad is across the street from the Kimmel Center, which is at 300 South Broad. Confused? I was. Usually the even numbers are all on the same side of the street. Oh well, the show was still sold out, so at least some people knew where they were going. Cell is composed of three short dance pieces with a short interlude. Each takes place in a different room (well, the first and last are in the same room, but it takes a minute for that to sink in) and while I didn’t love each of its fifty-five minutes, I’d say I enjoyed a good fifty-plus. The beginning of the first piece was visually stimulating and really unlike anything I’d seen before. The choreography is meant to challenge (choreographer Oscar Araiz created the piece to address the Holocaust and other moments of human oppression), and it’s very confrontational, at times more movement than dance. The second piece is far “dancier,” with the use of two fantastic props that I don’t want to give away (let’s just say that I was worried on more than one occasion for the safety of the dancers). The costuming in this piece was genius, too: how better to costume your performers in an evening about restriction than to put them in corsets? The interlude between the second and third pieces took place in the sanctuary of the Broad Street Ministry and was quite unexpected. If you were just passing through, you might have missed it, or been more interested in your surroundings than the couple on the pews at the far end of the room. The third piece encouraged audience participation: the dancers had created their own room of mirrors and a man with a microphone encouraged you to enter. Some members of the audience began to dance with the corps, or in opposition to them. I declined, more because I was afraid the experience might cause me to channel “The Music and the Mirror” from A Chorus Line which, admittedly, was stuck in my head. The choreography within the mirrors, and immediately after, was less intense and complex than in the previous pieces, but no less polished or interesting. The fifty-five minutes were over too soon, and I left the venue wishing that I hadn’t stopped dancing after high school.
Festival rating: Very good.

Every Day Above Ground
I’ve not read Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, on which Every Day Above Ground is based, but after seeing SaBooge’s play, I feel that I should. Because I spent most of my hour and a half at the Wilma wondering exactly what the hell was going on. I grew up with Billy the Kid a very important part of my context. He was killed not far from my hometown, and the village where my grandparents keep a ski cabin is absolutely smothered by “Billy the Kid was here” paraphernalia. I figured I knew the Kid. Which is probably why I was so confused by the nonlinear narrative, the zombie-like makeup (I wish I’d brought editor Star with me!), the endless cycle of murders and resurrections. Everyone was alive; everyone was dead. On two occasions, everyone (who was on stage at the time) was naked—a nine-year-old girl sat immediately behind me, flanked by her two parents who probably thought they were taking their daughter to a family-friendly tale of the Old West, but who instead ended up murmuring to each other: “is she naked? I think she’s naked” while trying not to cover their daughters’ eyes against what she’d already seen. At the end of the show, I smiled at the girl and said to her “you survived.” She looked at me, wide-eyed, and said “yeah, but I wanted to leave after fifteen minutes.” Out of the mouths of babes! I wasn’t quite as eager to leave as she, but I did wonder why nothing in the Fringe guide indicated that this show wouldn’t be appropriate for all ages, and I found myself uncomfortable for her and her parents when things onstage would get especially R-rated.

So, did I like it? As you’ve probably guessed, no, not really. I’d put this into the same category that I put By Grimm into in that regard. I appreciated it as an art, but it wasn’t my aesthetic. Every Day Above Ground had more going for it, artistically, including a really phenomenal shadow-screen sequence, but that’s what a budget can do. Given my druthers, I’d choose By Grimm. Hard as it was to wrap my head around, I still found it infinitely more accessible. I’ll get my Billy the Kid in Ruidoso, New Mexico, next time I go skiing.
Festival rating: Good

Flip the Script
Okay, I was totally expecting the action onstage to pause, and the narrating figure to ask the audience, in the form of a poll, whether our brave hero should pick door number one or door number two. That’s not what happened. In fact, the different vignettes in Flip the Script transitioned between each other so flawlessly that it was hard to imagine that you were seeing only one of many different versions of the script that the characters had to familiarize themselves with. And even after the audience participation sections happened, their contributions to the goings-on onstage weren’t always apparent. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing, it just wasn’t what I thought I’d see. The strongest part of the show is the audience’s fairy god-narrator (whom is apparently to be thanked for Britney Spears); the weakest part of the show, unfortunately, was some of the rest of the cast. I don’t have a program, so I can’t identify anyone by name, but the actor and actress in the first scene at the performance of Flip the Script that I saw (the order is different every time) were significantly weaker than some of their counterparts. And because of the order of the shows and the decisions the audience made, the production ended on a bit of a down note. I guess that’s one of the risks you take in a production like this. In all, I enjoyed myself quite a bit, and so did the rest of the audience. It wasn’t art, but it was a good time.
Festival rating: Good to very good.

Suburban Love Songs
If it were possible to have crushes on inanimate objects, I’d totally be stalking Suburban Love Songs. A friend of mine had suggested that a dance piece performed by actors would be comically bad. But I had more faith in Karen Getz, and it turns out that I was right. Out of the nine shows I’ve seen thus far, this was my favorite. The music (which Getz said in a post-show talkback was the motivation behind the entire performance) did a perfect job of setting the scene, and I believed every dancin’ minute of it. The actors—all of them local performers with extensive backgrounds in comedic acting and nearly no background in dance—did a brilliant job with Getz’s choreography. I’m not sure I wouldn’t have picked them out if they were trying to blend in to the corps of the Philadelphia Ballet, but onstage with each other, they looked fantastic. Their timing and execution was perfect, they only looked awkward when the story called for it, and they seemed really, genuinely, comfortable in their own bodies, which surprised me because in my experience, a lot of actors don’t (can’t?) just cut loose. They take movement classes, but this was a category unto itself. Nobody can tell these actors they aren’t dancers, too. (And good for them, because it’s something to add do their resumes under “special skills!”) Their performances were flawless. Add to that, the perfection of the overall piece: the choreography, the staging, the set, the costumes, the sound mixing, and you come out with one of the best evenings of dance I’ve seen in a very long time. Suburban Love Songs ran just under an hour, but I could easily have watched it for three. It was just that terrific. And hey, Karen, if you’re reading this? I want to be in your next piece. I work for cheap.
Festival rating: Excellent.

Image via The Sign Generator