The Philadelphia Fringe Festival might as
well be called Fringe
Subsidy Publishing, LLC.
Participating "artists" pay an entry
fee and then rent a venue space, meaning that moneyed people with
minimal
talent can become temporary ‘artists.’ The big challenge is coming up a zany,
absurdist
skit and then getting your friends to be actors. Fringe
Arts founder Ezra Buzzington, formerly known
as Jonathan Harris, likes to say what
the Fringe is not: sloppy, late, unprofessional, ego-driven
or amateurist. This
is definitely true in an
alternate universe.
Playwright
George Brant says he spent 5 months researching his play “Grounded,” about drone warfare. “I wasn’t expecting to write about
pilots,” he wrote, “but during my research I was struck by the fact that during
Obama’s
first three
months in office, he was using three times as many drone attacks as Bush
did.” Grounded became an off-Broadway hit in 2015 when Oscar winner Anne
Hathaway was in the pilot’s seat. Philadelphia
goes ‘drone’
when director Kathryn MacMillan teams up with
actress Kittson O’Neill for InterAct Theatre’s production of this famous one
woman show (until October 23). O’Neill plays the pilot who bombs targets 12
hours a day without ever
having to leave the Velveeta cheese comfort of her Air Force trailer. How will all this armchair warfare affect
the psyche of this hard working woman? "What makes Brant’s play exceptional is its driving,
white-hot sense of
identification with a woman who is not, on the face of it, a sympathetic character,”
Scotland
The fish that
audiences will see fall from the sky during the Wilma’s production of
When the
Rain Stops Falling has a counterpart in real life: the foot long (smelly)
catfish dropped
by a bird of prey that hit a woman in the face
in Fairmount Park
That
Stupid F*cking Bird, also the name of an adaptation of Chekov’s The Seagull by the
a lot of direct audience “addresses” and (according to a
2015 American Theatre Review), “rants about the uselessness
of contemporary theatre” where “the
word ‘sucks’ comes up often as does the F word that rhymes with
it.” The play goes much deeper than
hipster cur the rants, however.
Scripted by Posner in 2013, TSFB has played all over the US
to generally good reviews if
only because there’s no subject like
unrequited love to get audiences to shed a tear or clench a fist at
their personal, unpleasant memories.
overrated babbler,” whose
plays are “like reading a billion tweets at
one sitting.” But this “nimblest of
storytellers” continues
storytellers” continues
to hit pay dirt with his classic Mrs. Warren’s Profession, about a high
class prostitute and brothel
class prostitute and brothel
keeper played by 5 time
Barrymore Award nominee, Mary Martello,
who’s reunion with daughter
who’s reunion with daughter
Vivie (Claire Inie-Richards) at The Lantern
(until October 9) sets off a
chain reaction with a number
chain reaction with a number
of predatory men. The legendary Martello
delivers a flawless performance; she’s also fun to watch
as she dons big Victorian hats. Inie-Richards
captures the soulless quality of the unforgiving Vivie
when Mrs. Warren comes clean about her job,
though Vivie becomes human when she sheds a few
tears. Vivie may be Shaw’s New Woman but she lacks her mother’s there there. David Bardeen as
the blunt-to-the-bone, hyper masculine Mr.
Praed gives the play its finest dialogue. Actor Daniel
Fredrick as Frank Gardner becomes the classic
image of the beautiful Victorian lad in
the style
of Brideshead
Revisited, while John Lopes as the Rev. Samuel Gardner and Andrew Criss as
Sir George Crofts keep the acting levels in Mrs. Warren’s Profession pretty much
close to perfect.
The American
classic, Rogers and Hammerstein’s South
Pacific has been packing them in at The Walnut Street Theatre. Catch this time
capsule gem with powerful musical lyrics and surprising literary references
(Andre Gide and Marcel Proust) before October 23. This impeccable production is a credit to WST ’s
Artistic Director, Bernard Havard, and writer James Michener's 1947 novel,
'Tales of the South Pacific,’ from which the show is based.
