By DCist contributor Seth Rose

Reminds us of: Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind with a Monty Python sensibility

Flop, Fine or Fringe-tastic? Fringe-tastic.

The process of writing a play, even a short one, can take weeks of painstaking research, edits, and rewrites. For the 23 short plays written by Miranda Rose Hall for 22 Boom!, it was more like an hour or so. During her residency at Center Stage in Baltimore, Hall took to writing short commissioned plays based on the suggestions of audience members in pre-show lobbies. By the time the show ended, Hall had finished the play to hand off to the commissioner. 22 Boom is a collection of the best of these plays.

As you might expect, they aren’t the most polished scripts, but Nu Sass makes this work to their advantage. With one notable exception, they are all memorized and rehearsed, but this doesn’t stop the cast from invoking the frantic, knife-edge feeling of an improvised performance, drawing from a costume rack and boxes of props at the back of the stage and flitting between as many characters as there are plays in the show. They feel right at home in the absurd, deliberately inconsistent world of Hall’s many plays, and the result is a feeling of controlled madness perfectly suited to show them off.

The one notable exception from the 22 plays of the title is conceived and written in the lobby by a guest playwright during the performance, just like Hall’s originals. It’s a testament to the actors’ skill that the one show that is actually improvised feels no different from all the others, and indeed it wouldn’t feel at all out of place slotted into the normal rotation. If they repeat this gambit every show, Nu Sass has in 22 Boom! a worthy addition to genre of “shows that change as they are performed”.

Disclosure: DCist contributor Jonelle Walker appears in this show.

22 Boom! Is playing at the National Museum of Women in the Arts on July 23 at 12:15 p.m. and July 24 at 1:45 p.m..

See here for more of DCist’s Capital Fringe 2016 reviews.