Shoshinz, star of A Day in the Life of Miss Hiccup. Photo by Pat Padua

Unless you count DJ Natty Boom, who stripped to an electrical-tape bra during her set, nobody took off their clothes during Friday night’s Fringe Festival preview under the sweltering Baldacchino Gypsy Tent. The full extent of Fringiness can only be hinted upon in such a format: four-minute chunks with bright letters superimposed on top of performers and an overheated and noisy crowd who make it hard to hear lines. But the preview is a good summation of what Fringe is all about, and a couple of acts stand out amid the fray.

Camp

I’m not a fan of that knowing, winking tone, but camp is a crowd pleaser, and some of the biggest audience responses came for DC Trash, with Ron Litman’s portrayal of a homeless man singing “It’s raining Bums, ” and Thomas Choinacky’s Thomas is Titanic, a one-man reenactment of the four-hour movie in sixty minutes, which he condensed even further for the preview audience to four minutes. Like a number of works on the program, his performance struck me as the kind of work that emerges from children putting on shows for an imaginary audience behind their closed bedroom door. Such innocent observations can grow to adult obsessions — see Timothy Treadwell in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man — and that sense of ageless play pervades many Fringe shows.

In the News

DC Trash is one of a number of works that treat topics ripped from the headlines: global warming (Adam Ruben and Chuck Na’s Dr. Science’s Science Time Science-va-ganza!), gay adoption (Field Trip Theatre’s Stopgap) and the Occupy movement (DC Trash, Reverend Nuge’s OCCUPY This! and Nu Sass Productions’ Tent of Dreams: An Occuplay). The Nu Sass treatment of the Occupy movement seems to bridge the predominant styles of Fringe performance: a group of younger actors play directly to the audience, while an older actor sits angrily at the edge of the stage before ranting about the CIA, remaining well within the fourth wall.

Dance

More than a few dance previews featured variations on the female pas de deux, expressed in dirty tango (Avalanche Theatre Company’s Despertar), MOVEius Dance’s Flight of Fancy, “a steam punk ballet” danced to a not particularly steam punk soundtrack of sensitive indie folk-rock, and one of the most intriguing acts previewed, Kelly Bond and Melissa Krodman’s Colony. Their four-minute performance consisted of striped dancers gamely running in place for their full allotted time to an electronic soundtrack that suggested some kind of fascist future (or present?) Kafka’s In the Penal Colony is the clear reference. Bond and Krodman refused to acknowledge the audience, closing their act with a living freeze-frame that left the crowd quietly confused, but I’m going to plug them as a promising piece of theater that’s experimental without being self-indulgent.

Comedy

Stand-up comedy doesn’t seem very Fringy to me, but it is well represented in one-person shows that walk a line between memoir, impersonation, and social commentary. As a teenager, Chantal Martineau Justin Purvis was told he would go blind by age 20, and his Hysterical Blindness wrings humor out of personal struggle. Vijai Nathan addresses the immigrant experience in her stand-up memoir McGoddess, which asks if one can be Hindu and still eat at McDonalds. What If Works’ Right to Remain … The Life and Mind of Tupac Shakur, is a performance at odds with itself, offering the late rap icon as a gangsta outsider drawn to the character of Richard III and reading lines from Shakespeare, but falling back into gangsta diction as if that’s what ‘s expected of him as a performer.

Scena Theatre’s Mein Kampf—Eine Komedie is a self-proclaimed surrealist comedy whose Fuhrer rants lines like “I’ve never cared for gravity.” In the Nazi ensemble I noticed an actor familiar from Natalie Zanin’s Historic Strolls, a series of walking tours-cum-street theater which I wrote about here, and I recommend her entertaining and historical tours.

Opera

A range of operas are on the Fringe schedule, a few of them specifically in the rock vein. Off the Wall Theatre Company’s Mindset was created by 17-year old Jace Casey, who began his career in 2007 playing Tiny Tim. The show I’m most intrigued by is Catherine Asaro‘s rock opera The Diamond Star Project. Asaro, the daughter of a nuclear chemist and a physics teacher herself, is a Nebula-award-winning science fiction author, and learned to sing to delve into a character in her novel Diamond Star. Asaro performed without a band and treated the audience to Ann-Margret-inspired moves between verses of her unusual phrasing.

Return Engagements

I was sorry that the Pointless Theater Co. didn’t preview their show, Imagination Meltdown Adventure, but I really enjoyed their Fringe program last year, The Super Spectacular Dada Adventures of Hugo Ball. The group promises a kid-friendly PG-13 show this year, but that shouldn’t dampen the ensemble’s infectious enthusiasm.

See the complete Capital Fringe 2012 schedule here.