As you might expect of a fringe festival, the COMEDY of PF-12 veers to the edgy and raucous. In Kate Gurney's production Murder, A Comedy, Milo is like a lot of college grads who have to move back home. Except that his parents are serial killers. If you're hankering after some good, old-fashioned raunch, a good bet might be Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday's Sex, aka Wieners and Boobs, which was written by the guys behind Wet Hot American Summer and which is billed as involving a dildo and a live chicken. Finally, why should guys get to perform so much of the dumbass shenanigans of the cultural canon? In Raw Sugar's You Smell Like Whiskey and Bad Choices, three women wake up after a night of drinking and must reconstruct their possible crimes, mashing up the bromance and mystery genres as well as cartoons, 1990's pop, and puppets.
IMPROV comedy will also be represented in PF-12, as performed by both people and puppets. In First World Problems, The Improvised Puppet Project conjures up fully improvised fun for grown-ups, in a world where felt and flesh easily commingle. Audience members will feel safe and sound as Connor McGrath performs Fringe Tonight!, a standup comedy and variety show, pointedly without audience participation. And the very funny posse of Brent Askari, Rachel Flehinger, Elliot Brackett Lyons, Lisa Muller-Jones, John Scribner, and Eric Worthley perform as World Premiere Productions, in an improv show cleverly entitled TBD.
Tempering all the hilarity are several darker and MORE SERIOUS WORKS, including Bare Fruit, a production of the Passages Project and Awareness Unlimited. In this original musical, a man comes home to face a broken past and his deepest fears. A revived Lanyard Theatre Company presents a seaside story of a young suicide survivor who meets a man claiming to be half man, half whale, in Whale Watch. And a four-play program from playwright Michael Kimball billed as Bless Me Father, I Have Sinned includes Nightmare Girl: A Monologue with Sound and Lights, in which a young woman off her meds visits the scene of her recurring nightmares. (Kimball's other three plays are Say No More!, about a silence competition between a married couple; The Brownwater Legend, the tragic tale and historical fantasy of Consternation "Kid" Brownwater; and Good Golly Miss Molly at Recess, in which three adolescent girls help a boy bury a pet in the schoolyard.). Another show of multiple shorts is producer Michael Toth's A Cursory Night of Short-Lived Tales. Anxiety — The Lecture is taken from a play about American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan by John Kerr, author of A Dangerous Method (recently made into a Cronenberg film); writer and director Carl Currie presents the opening scene from his first play, The Tall Reunion; The Fulcrum, by Tobias D. Elliott explores a twisted relationship between two men; and Jefferson Navicky's So Long Together, about (and I quote) "a condom collector, her daughter and a stone mason."
