Jill's PLAF Diary for Friday, September 5–Sunday, September 7

The European Lesson
The European Lesson gets off to a promising start. Philly actor Jeb Kreager plays a cultural anthropologist (without a degree in anthropology) who is interested in portraying other cultures in an accurate, faithful way: not, as the World's Fairs of days gone by did it, with Caucasians depicting the Chinese and Native Americans playing East Indians, but rather as they are. As such, he tells us, he has brought a Slovak family (Aaron Cromie, Cathrine Slusar, Sarah Sanford, and John Zak) to the theatre, so that we may observe the nuances of their everyday life. He will translate for us. Of course, it's evident from the start that the family is working off a rather dramatic script: Slusar's character is pregnant by a man not her husband, Sanford is a clairvoyant prone to having disturbing visions at inconvenient times. This is not the stuff of everyday life, but rather of our anthropologist-narrator's fancy. It's sublimely weird and funny and wonderful through-and-through—up until the last five or ten minutes of the play, when things get a bit too bizarrely avant-garde. Instead of ending the piece with a note of finality, it ends with a "what the fuck?"—and calls the rest of the work into question. Kreager's character's world is collapsing all around him, but rather than end on a note of death or desertion—there's opportunity for both, and both would have made sense—we're left with what basically amounts to expressionist ballet. As wonderful as the first hour of the show was, its conclusion didn't deliver.

The Maguffin
The Maguffin has behind it a really amusing premise: what if, one day, members of the LGBT community ceased to care about gay marriage? What would the Religious Right have to rally against then? Unfortunately, what could have been a truly engaging show ended up over-written and heavy-handed, skewering the "crooked" Republican party without a real justification (that some Republicans are religious homophobes really isn't reason enough) or balance (the Democrats are hardly mentioned). I'm far from the most conservative person out there, but I like to think that I've put thought into my politics, and that thoughtfulness is what's missing from The Maguffin. Thoughtfulness and good acting. After the first two minutes of the show, during which the talented guitarist (whose name I don't know because I cannot, for the life of me, find the program) sang a funny song about gay political sex scandals, it really was all downhill, which made me sad, because I really like the people of Stone Soup whom I've met and really wanted them to do a better show than they ultimately did.

Vampire Lesbians of Sodom
Vampire Lesbians of Sodom isn't by any stretch of the imagination a good script, but by god is it a fun one. And who better to produce it than To the Wall Productions, which previously brought us such fun shows as Oedipus Kings, The Rivals: A Drag Comedy, and Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical? (I'm beginning to think that To the Wall may be a little obsessed with sex. Or camp. Or both.) The show, which is, as you may have guessed, focused on vampire lesbians whose origins can be traced all the way back to Sodom, travels through the ages, from pre-Biblical Sodom (we all know how that went down), to Hollywood in the 1920s, and finally, to Las Vegas in the 1980s. There's not much plot beyond that, but all of the cast members—Josh L. Hitchens, Joshua S. Ray, Kara Senich, Ru Pujara, Dallas Drummond, Amanda Greco, Cindy Spitko, and Rob Cutler—deserve to be commended for handling their campy lines with the kind of dedication usually applied to the works of Shakespeare. It's obvious that the cast wasn't just having fun, but that they really respected Charles Busch's work—if only because it enabled them to have fun. This is the only show being reviewed in this diary that's still running, and for a good time, I'd suggest you run yourselves over to see it.

The Play about the Coach
Sitting in some bar in March, watching two teams I can't remember play a Sweet Sixteen game, I remarked to Ross: "You know, sometimes, I think it's much more interesting watching the teams' coaches than watching the actual game." Turns out I'm not the only person who's ever thought that, as it's the premise for actor/playwright Paden Fallis's one-man show, The Play about the Coach, produced in conjunction with Rocketship Productions. For almost an hour, Fallis bounds across the stage with the kind of energy that you usually only see from, well, NCAA basketball coaches. His performance is an impressive, surprisingly realistic one, and even despite the presence of anyone else on stage, it was easy sometimes to believe that we were watching a real coach at a real playoff basketball game. The primary difference? We could hear him. Talking to the players, talking to the assistant coach, talking to the ref, talking to himself. The tension he's feeling is palpable, likely aided by the facts that his marriage is falling apart and that he's slowly going blind from glaucoma. It's dramatic, but it's realistic, and the only flaws to the show, if there are any, are our glimpses into the coach's internal monologue. These take us just a bit too far outside the action and offer an insight that I'm not sure we need. That being said, they don't last especially long before dumping us back into the main action of the play—a play that, despite being more a "football person" than a "basketball person," I've found to be one of the Festival's strongest thus far.

Manic Swell
My festival calendar has been awfully low on dance this year, but I was happy to be able to fit Manic Swell, produced by various members of the Indigenous Pitch Dance Collective, into my schedule. Made up of six individual, disparate pieces, Manic Swell made for a satisfying, if uneven, hour and a half of dance. Highlights included Illadelphlave, who showcased impressive breakdancing skills, performed to an unlikely live accompaniment, and Underground DanceWorks' multimedia "Displacement and an Orb (Part One)," which combined video with perfectly timed "EclectiFunk" choreography by former Phillyist V.I.P. Charles Tyson, Jr. Tyson's dancers are always impressively in sync with one another, especially compared with some of the other pieces in Manic Swell, in which one or two dancers always seemed a beat and a half behind. Recent Drexel grad Lauren Mandilian, for example, was invited to act as guest choreographer in the show, and although the animation she designed to accompany the piece was quite impressive, the performance itself seemed a bit flat. Amidst the evening's ups and downs, there was, however, one shining star: "Phantom Troops" by Stephen Welsh/Swerve, a modern ballet in three parts dealing with the Army's 23rd Special Unit, classified until the mid-90s, which was composed of artists, architects, and theatrical designers, and responsible for staging elaborate and realistic fake battles to distract the Nazis from the real troops moving through Europe. The piece was moving, amusing, and firmly rooted in its setting, even if all the soldiers were barefoot. It told just enough of the story that I wanted to hear more, and showed just enough impressive dance technique (including aerialism on an obstacle course net) that I briefly entertained the notion of taking up dance again. I definitely hope to see this company perform again in the future, whether they're staging "Phantom Troops" or something else.