FRINGE. Photo by LaTur/Flickr
Capital Fringe is upon us for its tenth year running, with venues this year centered around Fringe’s new Headquarters near H Street. The festival showcases over 130 productions from generally small, nascent theater companies and artists. In the spirit of making “fringe” art, many of the shows experiment with audience interaction, taboo subjects, and unusual formats of the variety you’re unlikely to see in even the most experimentally friendly big hitter venues in town.
Over the next few weeks of the Fringe festival, July 9 through August 2, DCist will run short reviews of a small selection of the huge number of shows that have caught our attention. Since many of these shows are essentially world premieres (and tend to have only very short “teaser” descriptions of what to actually expect within the show), this month’s theater guide humbly resigns itself to highlighting a very incomplete list of some of the shows we’ll be reviewing. Reviews will all be posted as early as possible within each show’s (very short) run, with a note about how many open performances still remain.
>>DISHWASHER is a show with a very, very literal title. Brian Feldman (the mind behind the ongoing weekly interactive show TXT) will go to the house of each ticket-holder (one per night), wash their dishes, and cold read a monologue of their choosing.
>>CHEEKY MONKEY SIDESHOW PRESENTS: CMSS X 3D, OK? The teaser for this show from the Fringe preview ended with the actor appearing to swallow an inflated three-foot long balloon. I don’t know if the trick will be repeated for the actual show, but the uncanny feat was just about all I could think about by the end of the preview showcase.
Domestic Animals. Photo via Capital Fringe
>>WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOLF is a collab effort from local Bling Pug Arts Collective and eastern European Theater of Self-Loathing. Blind Pug’s show was one of my favorites from last year’s fringe; as one of their creative minds has since been employed as a regular contributor for DCist, though, we won’t be running a full review this year.
>>#SEXTS Fringe handbook 101: you can guarantee a certain amount of buzz for your show (or for anything else in life) by tying it to sex. You can also make sure it shows up first on alphebetized lists by starting the name with a symbol (though it was still beat in ranking by a number and a quotation mark) #maybenextyear!
>>WHEN WE GROW UP Things can go so, so, wrong when you add a healthy dose of audience interaction to a show, though that’s generally part of what makes them one of my favorite types of show. As long as you have a wacky enough premise— for this show, that’s a strange parallel world where your job is your entire life and determined when you’re still too young to know any better about what’s really out there. So, just like real life.
>>I’d like to end with a selection that caught our eye not due to its premise but due to its poster. DOMESTIC ANIMALS borrows the classic “Three Wolf Moon” t-shirt design for its poster. I’m not sure what that has to do with the play, but damn if it didn’t catch my eye.
>>UP FOR DEBATE, a musical comedy about a (previously?) sinister communist running for Congress
>>THE GREAT AWKWARD HOPE a meta show about a show, about the sometimes-awkwardness of talking about race
>>FROM SEVEN LAYERS TO BIKINI TOP IN LESS THAN FIVE HOURS *Actual run time 55 minutes.
>>THE PAPER GAME The one-paragraph press release contains two separate hashtags. #hip
>>I AM THE GENTRY A story about gentrification around H street, (presumably including the example of, uh, fringey theater venues)
>>PRIEST / PENITENT It’s about Catholic guilt and confession so I’m just assuming this is about Daredevil
>>THE EULOGY A funerary comedy and a eulogy for a man who died eating too many eggs. It is probably too soon to make Gaston jokes— sorry.
>>DC TRASH – RECYCLED The view of D.C. from the cab of a trash truck.
>>HOW TO QUIT YOUR DAY JOB An original musical about (unhappily) working in D.C.
>>AMBIEN DATE NIGHT The showcase preview involved throwing pill bottles into the audience; not sure if they’re Ambien, but I’ll take some and keep you posted.
>>I FEEL FUNNY A one-man show about misadventures in stand up comedy
>>I THOUGHT THE EARTH REMEMBERED ME Filed under both “interactive” and “dance”; consider me intimidated but intrigued
>>ROGER (NOT HIS REAL NAME) bills itself as a “homeless man’s House of Cards.”
If we’ve missed a can’t-miss show (over 100 of them aren’t included in this article, so yes, we certainly have) be sure to let us know in the comments.
