Image courtesy Cara Gabriel/Capital Fringe.

Gentrification isn’t easy to talk about. In fact, in some company, you’re more likely to hear euphemisms like “transitioning” or “up and coming” or “huh, there sure are a lot of white gay people moving there these days.”

Sometimes, it’s easier to just not think about the process at all, even when witnessing droves of (mostly) white people flocking to the Fringe headquarters just north of H Street in Ubers. But at least one play in the festival tackles the subject head on.

Cara Gabriel’s one-woman show is apt to induce laughter, and some tears, though not ulcers. Gabriel doesn’t set out to “solve” anything, but rather to document a neighborhood undergoing a transition that would be all too easy, and considerably more comfortable, for some residents to just not think about in the first place.

The show, a remount of a series of talks given at the Atlas Theater a few years ago, chronicles her experiences moving to a house north of H Street, and shortly thereafter having the titular realization that she was part of this fraught movement. She unflinchingly catalogs the bad— the long-existing crime and the poverty, as well as the new pain and displacement generated as the neighborhood “improves”— as well as the good, in the form of genuinely moving accounts of her neighbors’ lives, hopes, struggles, and celebrations.

The human factor is what makes a ticket to the show so much more than a (dubious) bit of evidence that the ticket bearer is a socially conscious human being. It is easily one of the funniest and most touching Fringe shows currently running.

I AM THE GENTRY runs at Dance Place: Hyman M. Perlo Studio. Remaining performances are:
Tonight, July 16 at 6:15 p.m.
Wednesday, July 22 at 6:30 p.m.
Saturday, July 25 at 2:30 p.m.

See here for more of DCist’s Fringe 2015 reviews.