Fringe Festival: Cover Me in Humanness

Meghan Nesmith has Humanness covered.

Eewwwwwwwwwww.

The naked, vaguely icky-sounding title turns out to be apt for a show that's quintessentially Fringeworthy in its earnestness and its nascence. One of its four characters, a shy Groovy Movies store clerk with an irritating predilection for autobiography, is obsessed with the film Footloose, but the piece itself plays more like a Hal Hartley movie, following a pair of budding romances among unlikely lovers.

The clerk, Randy (Kevin O'Reilly) has a thing for one of his brittle customers, Beth (Meghan Nesmith), while National Gallery security guard Nigel (Matt Pearson) is besotted with a sculpture (!) that appears to be Edgar Degas's Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. Gwen Grastorf plays the statue, and she brings a disciplined physicality to the part, interrupting long stretches of stillness with fluid, graceful movements. She also does some great work just with her eyes. "Without your mouth language, we statues vibrate from the inside out," she tells an understandably vexed Nigel.

Indeed, the performances are the best thing about the piece. The actors are all committed and believable, and they keep us invested in the fates of their characters even after the script goes all vague and flowery. It isn't their fault that dramatist Jake Jeppson hasn't quite developed the connective tissue needed to tie these dreamers’ explications of their loneliness to, say, Sylvia Schell, a real-life character who posts videos of herself performing her original line dances on YouTube.