Jill's PLAF Diary for Friday, September 7-Sunday, September 9

Sonic Dances
I hadn't been planning on going to see Sonic Dances, but I work literally twenty feet from City Hall, and it was an excuse to leave work a little early on Friday, so I made my way toward the courtyard, unsure of exactly what it was I'd be seeing.

A dozen or so people were milling about, unsure of where to sit or stand, and eventually directed toward the perimeter of the compass by the helpful PLAF ushers. That dozen was eventually joined by several dozen more, until the crowd became a sort of membrane around the compass. Keep in mind, this is the middle of City Hall at 5:30 on a Friday afternoon. It's a main thoroughfare. Lots of people entered the courtyard confused by the ever-growing crowd. Some circumnavigated it. Some, oblivious of anything but their desire to get the weekend started, walked straight through it. One person asked if this was some kind of a demonstration. Another was curious to know if we were in a cult. This was all before the dancers entered the space. (Once they did, a bike messenger actually rode through the center of the circle, coming within inches of one of the dancers, and two City Hall security guards, seemingly unaware of the scheduled performance, tried to get the crowd to disperse.)

This all made for excellent people watching, but one shouldn't discount the impressive performance itself: six dancers with perfectly-synced up iPods and speakers strapped to their stomachs, moving first through the City Hall Courtyard, then out through the north (and I think, prettiest) exit of the massive building, and across the street to Thomas Paine Plaza at the Municipal Services building, dancing first at the base of "The Government of the People" (the big statue that looks like a lot of people squished on top of one another) and then all around "Your Move" (the installation of various larger-than-life board game pieces). The piece is impressively athletic and amazingly well timed, as I've come to expect from Group Motion's performances, and I only hope that they've got a few surprise performances in the coming week so that even more people can see the gorgeous production.

BATCH: An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle
Unlike Ross, I don't shy from experimental theatre. But maybe I need to start being a little more selective, because I found very little that was redeeming about the experiment in BATCH. I really wanted to. I wanted to like the piece, which the director's note warns "isn't a play" and "doesn't have conventional exposition or development," but I just didn't. It had so much going for it: innovative staging, flawless multimedia integration, great, very versatile performers – but in the end, the performance failed to do anything more than amuse me for about ten minutes out of the eighty or so I spent watching it. I'm not a statistician, but that doesn't seem to be a very good proportion of amusement-to-hatred.

Explanatorium
I loved Headlong's Cell at the Festival last year so much that I made absolutely certain to include this year's production in my Festival schedule. Fortunately, although Explanatorium is very different from last year's performance, it's no less excellent.

To talk about the production too much would be to spoil the surprise for any readers who are still planning on attending. It's surprisingly participatory (the program guide tells you to wear blue and it's not a joke – if you're not wearing a blue shirt, they will make you wear the one they hand you) and at times stunningly beautiful. It explores the idea of the paranormal without ever affirming a belief in it – or at least, without asking the audience to believe. They give you props. They give you instructions. They let you lay down. And in the end, there's snow. (But be warned: as you walk through the snow, you're going to want to do so quickly. The night we went, the snow machine fell on someone.)

Isabella
I love Pig Iron. I love Shakespeare. The resulting syllogism would dictate that I therefore love Pig Iron doing Shakespeare. But, as we all learned in high school, false syllogisms are not uncommon, and A+B doesn't always add up to C – in other words, I didn't love Isabella.

Isabella's performers all end up nude at one point or another (all but one begin that way), and the show gets you used to the nudity right away. Not long after, it gets you used to the conceit (reanimated corpses doing Shakespeare), and it's done in a surprisingly believable way (inasmuch as reanimated but non-zombie corpses can believably do Shakespeare). And then... Well, and then there's nothing much to report on. The show remains interesting as long as the concept remains fresh, but seeing as this is a show put on by cadavers, the freshness can only last so long until decomposition begins, and the audience gets stuck watching another hour or so of a show that has long since ceased to be all that novel. Things pick up at the end, sure, as the cadavers begin to take over the piece – and the final "resting" place of all the bodies onstage gets more than a few laughs. But two-thirds or more of the play did little more than allow me to think about how much I preferred seeing the Globe's production of Measure for Measure when they came to Philadelphia two years ago.

Hearts of Man
Okay, sure. I'll believe you when you tell me that some people charged with committing various internet sex crimes against minors are framed. But I'm going to guess (and I have no facts with which to back this up – I just watch a lot of To Catch a Predator) that for every person who is unfairly or illegally lured into the activity that eventually results in his being charged with luring, there are ten others who deserve the charges. So I'd really appreciate it if you didn't try to force on me your belief that prosecuting people for attempting to have sex with children is unfair. You're entitled to your opinion, sure, and I'm happy to debate the issue with you. But don't shove your politics down my throat, especially with such a volatile issue with so much grey area.

That being said, I would probably have minded the politics of Hearts of Man a lot less if the play had been better. But the script is weak (if you want your characters to sound like they're doing Shakespeare, produce The Merchant of Venice – don't write your own pseudo-soliloquies), the acting is over-the-top in a way that reminds me of a postmodern version of the speech and debate events I used to compete in in middle and high school, and the entire piece is underscored by an annoying percussion score meant to highlight especially pathological moments but proving to do nothing more than giving the audience one more thing to dislike about the piece. Hearts of Man has its moments (I was mildly amused by their Chris Matthews-like TV host), but ultimately, I think the only reason I didn't hate the play was because the memory of BATCH was still too fresh in my mind.

LEAP: The Actors' Improv Experiment
I love improv, but up until Saturday, it hadn't really occurred to me that I need to add a qualifier to that statement: I love improv comedy. Sure, I can admire people who can create scenes off the cuff without hemming and hawing and a slew of "like"s and "ummm"s. But just because I admire you doesn't mean that you're entertaining me.

That was the problem with LEAP. I admired every single person on stage, and you couldn't have paid me to try the same. (Improv after only ten days training? Yikes!) But I just wasn't consistently entertained. That's the nature of the beast that is improv—and the experiment that is LEAP—so it wasn't entirely unexpected. I just wanted to laugh a little more.

Killing Women
Once in a while, instead of watching other people's plays, I like to be in them. And someday, if I play my cards right, I'd like to be in one produced by up-and-comers Nice People Theatre Company. Their second production, Killing Women, was good fun and you could tell that the performers, under the guidance of the fantastic Bill Felty, loved every moment of their time onstage.

Killing Women, which unfortunately only ran last weekend, is a comedy about assassins-for-hire and all of the politicking that goes on in that world. (Death over a lost game of Monopoly? Why not?) The deceptively simple set design by Christian Pedone is innovative and versatile, the movement fast-paced, and the script is funniest when it's at its most ridiculous. Nice People founders Miriam White and Nicole Blicher shine in their roles, and Chris Fluck is lovably slow, especially when you consider his occupation. The show had its rough moments, but all in all, I found this little Fringe show to be stronger than most of the Live Arts shows I saw earlier in the weekend.

Sweetie Pie
"Hmm," I thought as I sat down in Plays and Players and opened my program, noting that several actors were credited as members of the chorus, "I didn't think that Sweetie Pie was a musical."

Silly me. Not that kind of chorus. The other kind. The Greek kind.

Nothing in the Fringe guide description of Sweetie Pie gave me any reason to believe that I'd be watching a postmodern revisionist Oedipus Rex told more or less from the perspective of the queen/mother/wife, but that's exactly what the show is (with a little bit of Romeo and Juliet thrown in at the beginning). I'm not really spoiling anything by telling you that – you figure it out pretty quickly.

Would I have gone to Sweetie Pie if I'd known it was Oedipus all over again? I don't know. But I'm sure glad I did go, in any event, because the play is outstanding. Even at its most uncomfortable moments, I was happy to be in the audience. The whole cast, chorus included, was exceptionally strong and filled the space (not just the stage, but the whole space) with their presence. It's easy to see from this production why Madi Distefano is one of Philadelphia's most lauded theatre professionals.

ADDICTED TO BAD IDEAS: Peter Lorre's Twentieth Century
Things you don't expect to see during the Live Arts and Fringe Festivals, and/or at the World Cafe Live:

1. Circle pits.


2. Crowd surfing.


3. Stage diving.

Things I saw last night during the Live Arts and Fringe Festivals, and at the World Cafe Live:

1. Circle pits.


2. Crowd surfing.


3. Stage diving.

What? I thought I was going to see a rock opera about Peter Lorre!

Well... it was that, too.

I may have been one of the only people there last night who didn't know who World/Inferno Friendship Society was. Oops: turns out they're a punk outfit with a rather large following of mohawked punk kids who'd probably never heard of Peter Lorre until World/Inferno Friendship Society embarked upon this project. But what a project it is! Part Weimar-era cabaret, part ska, part high-octane post-punk, World/Inferno Friendship Society seeks to tell Peter Lorre's story in a way that I guarantee you nobody's ever thought of before, combining improbable music with multimedia clips of Lorre's films and quotes by the late performer.

Why Peter Lorre? There were no programs handed out at the performance, so the only answer I can come up with is "why not?" And as incongruous as it may seem, it ultimately works, even if the lyrics were often very difficult to understand. (During one song, the majority of the words appear on the screen over the stage, opera-style – I found that to be the most enjoyable number of the evening.) This was a different kind of performance for the festival, and a different kind of crowd – but a great way to finish my weekend!