Fort Worth Fringe Festival 9/10/2022 @ Fort Worth Community Arts Center
—Jan Farrington
DAY TWO of performances at the 6th Annual Fort Worth Fringe Festival gave us plenty to enjoy and think about. The venue, Fort Worth’s former Modern Art Museum, was hopping with visitors to the art exhibits around the building, and (I think) some overflow from the nearby Amon Carter Museum’s “Party on the Porch.” The Fringe pulled in bigger audiences on its first weekend day, and energy all around felt high.
Some impressions of the four pieces I saw on Saturday, September 10, in no particular order:
The takeaway from SceneShop’s “lived in” (written by artistic director Steven Alan McGaw) is: never buy a house from your creepy Uncle Ed. Especially if your even creepier cousin has been camped out in the place. Rob Bosquez directs, and Ron Fernandez plays Michael, a working-class striver with a lot of rules his father gave him: Hard Work Pays Off…Never Quit What You Start. Michael falls for Jane, and thinks adding a house to his “estate” (mostly a well-polished Ford pickup) would be a great wedding gift for her. Soon enough, of course, they start hearing sounds. And smelling smells. And the attic? Nobody’s brave enough to go up there. Fernandez is a good tale-spinner, looking back sadly on his stubborn refusal to “quit” on his project. If he’d only had one more rule: When Your Wife Says She’s Freaked Out…Grab the Keys and Get Her Out of There! “lived in” is a short, shivery good time.
From Minnesota comes actor Andrew Erskine Wheeler with Whoosh!, a compelling one-man (though multi-character) show. Erskine was a longtime company member of Tim Robbins’ Actors Gang Theatre in Los Angeles, and has won awards for his show Booth’s Ghost and other works. Whoosh!, directed energetically by Allison Vincent, is the sort of storytelling we listen to with eyes wide—this epic told not by an ancient Greek (there’s a prop copy of The Odyssey onstage), but a jittery, half-drunk Irishman. Wheeler plays (among other roles) an Irish immigrant logger who joins the Army to follow a brother; an honorable sergeant; an “Indian” woman; and an artist who regrets his past portrayals of military glory and the conquered tribes. In the center of the action are two much larger “ghosts” of the area: the once wild St. Anthony Falls on the Mississippi (today imprisoned by concrete, locks, and spillways) and the now-submerged Spirit island—both dear to Native American tribes. Wheeler’s Irish Michael is a drinking man, more traumatized than his cheery manner reveals at first—and with the “whoosh” of a gray cloth, he transforms to other roles. A bit of audience participation and an ingenious use of props—a flat wooden shelf becomes a boat, an oar, and a saw in rapid order—add to the action. Wheeler has a wonderful stage presence, and a resonant voice whatever accent he’s using for the moment. Michael Hickey’s knack for survival—not just of the war, but also of his legendary (“whoosh!”) ride over the Falls—makes him a walking witness to danger, blood, death, grief, and loss. “I am a professional depictor!” he declares with pride—and the work of his life is to make sure these “ghosts” are not lost to time and tide. Wheeler gives a bravura performance.
If you’ve ever had to circle back and explain the “tone” of a recent text, you will empathize with the young couple of SMS, Caitlin (Caitlin Whitley) and Bryan (Blake Hametner), who have to rely entirely on texting to communicate during a particularly tense time in their relationship. (She’s stuck in a “No Service” sector of the Colorado mountains.) Written by David Sowden and Nicholas Zebrun (Sowden also directs), SMS has a smart, crisp way with dialogue (at certain points in the play, the two characters come forward to the audience to deliver rapid-fire talking-over-each-other dialogue—a clever way to show just how “separate” we can feel even when we’re in constant digital contact. Bryan is a worrier with a planned-out life, Caitlin has plans, but is more free-form. Yet from the start, we feel their love and trust in each other. They are high school sweethearts, now a few states apart at different colleges—and when Caitlin texts with a problem, Bryan’s terse texted answers throw her for a loop. She realizes the text-only situation is part of the problem: “I just need to hear his voice.” Both actors create complex portraits of these young people facing choices they aren’t quite up to handling—and finding that not all mistakes can be fixed. Writers Sowden and Zebrun give the text messages a male, amusingly deadpan voice (no credit given, but kudos). You want to smack “him” for utterly missing the right tone, every time--it’s like he’s programmed to do it. An interesting idea from Esoteric Productions, and well done.
An Iliad is a one-actor adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad (in the wonderful Robert Fagles translation) created by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare. I’ve seen it before, most recently at Undermain Theatre in Dallas, in a shadowy space filled with ancient artifacts. But I was glad to experience it again through actor Jeremy Todd and the Gulf Coast theater company Brazosport Center Stages from Clute, TX. Their version, ably directed by Susan Moss, has a subtly Texas tinge: a bare-wood picnic table provides a space for “heightened” and emphatic speech, and a cowboy-hatted guitarist (Cory Todd) sits to one side. He’s the soundtrack (and perhaps the “muse”) of the Bard’s story. This is, for starters, a trial of the actor’s memory and stamina: Todd never stops speaking and moving for a moment during the hour-long show, delivering complex dialogue, tremendously long lists (of ships, of warriors, of wars), and painting vivid images of the story’s famous characters: Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon, Andromache, Helen and more. This is a story about the “trick of our blood” that makes men go to war: yesterday, today, and tomorrow too in all likelihood. “Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,” the Bard begins. An hour later, he ends with the word “Ukraine”—the last entry in his eons-long list of every war in history. In between, we get to know the boyhood friends Achilles and Patroclus, the thuggish king Agamemnon, the smug and beautiful Helen, and above all, perhaps, the great Trojan prince Hector, who would rather be out in a field training horses. The scene between Hector, wife Andromache and their baby son is a heartbreaker. Todd portrays the Bard as an old, worn man, soulsick for the boys who die (he gives them familiar hometowns—Chicago, Dallas, Springfield—to bring the loss home to us) and the everlasting need for his witness. Good going, Brazosport.
The Fort Worth Fringe Festival ends Sunday night, 9/11/2022. Tickets are $10 per show at the door—and if you didn’t come this year, put it on your calendar for 2023. For information now and next time: texastheatres.org/fringe/
