ROARING INTO TOWN A killer is on the loose in New York City in Theater Tartare’s production of the Jose Rivera allegory about the AIDS epidemic. |
More drama occurs around the phenomena of LOVE AND LUST, explorations of which abound in PF-12. A middle-aged priests returns to his hometown to investigate a miracle and reunites with an old flame in Conor McPherson's Come On Over, presented by the American Irish Repertory Ensemble. In Stop Kiss, produced by Shawna Houston, two young women in New York City find themselves and each other. On the end of love and gender, men doing a shingling job discuss the end of love, in What's Behind the Question's production of Think Like Water. Love, jealousy, and moral complexity entwine in dark ways in April Singley's production of Iobair, which promises raw shocks and surprises; while Krista Lucht presents Woyzeck, the German classic of a man too long exploited and dehumanized by the military, his doctors, and his love. Finally, love finds a more upbeat incarnation in Mad Horse Theatre Company's Makin' Love!, in which David and Christine plus guests aim to make us all believe in love again.If that sounds like a dangerous proposition, let's turn to EVEN MORE POTENTIAL PERIL: A free-roaming tiger, for example, bleeds off New York citizens' sex drive and encourages them to stockpile guns and folklore, in Theater Tartare's production of A Tiger in Central Park. Danger is a bomb-laden bus in Speed, as in the movie, which it should be interesting to see Mad Horse pull off on stage; and in Erin Enberg's Desert Drinks, in which Las Vegas is accused of stealing a man's sunglasses, wallet, and youth, we can only guess that danger is man himself. Though really, what could be more treacherous than female adolescence? In Stacy Davidowitz's PINK!, produced by Cait Robinson, we lurch into the hysterical brutality of one summer night among 12 year-old girls.
6 Months 6 Weeks with ME Heart ME |
The short format and seat-of-the-pants staging of a fringe festival makes it particularly suitable for showcasing ONE-PERSON SHOWS, and PF-12 offers several. The Mike Daisey exposé of Apple's Chinese factories, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which has gotten lots of media attention for both its audacity and its fabrications, will be performed by Dramatic Repertory Company's Keith Powell Beyland. Michael Wood offers up another "giddy love letter to Maine," in the form of campy musical cabaret limning a bucolic Maine childhood, in ME Heart ME; and in another show built around songs, John Coons presents a new queer theater work called Six Months for Six Weeks. In The Complicity of Breakfast, White Flag Performance Group professes to use non-linear storytelling and "the theatre of the new millennium" to explore the structures of daily existence; and finally, Harlan Baker revives his treatment of organized labor in America, Jimmy Higgins: A Life in the Labor Movement.
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The fringe of the fringe of the fringe
Here are four beguilingly strange-sounding shows that I'm particularly hoping to catch myself:
Topics:
Theater
, Portland, Theater, Theatre, More 
, Portland, Theater, Theatre, Moby Dick, ALICE IN WONDERLAND, Fringe Festival, Mesmerized, Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, Less 
