~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SF Fringe Festival 2000

review in San Francisco Examiner by Rob Hurwitt

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Walk on the Fringe side makes for a
good gambol

Robert Hurwitt
EXAMINER THEATER CRITIC
Sept. 11, 2000

Buyer-beware theatergoing can be
rewarding

THEY COME from Canada (three groups this
year). They come from Australia,

New Zealand, Switzerland and Venezuela (one
apiece); from Florida (one), Colorado (two), New
York (three), Los Angeles (two), Alaska,
Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Seattle, Chicago and
Santa Barbara (one each). But most of the 52
groups performing in this year's San Francisco
Fringe Festival hail from San Francisco itself (24) or
the surrounding Bay Area (seven). Which is
probably just as it should be for the region's
principal non-juried showcase of aspiring young
theater artists and just plain shameless
self-promoters.

This year as every year, the festival that opened
Thursday and plays through Sunday is a glorious
11-day carnival of surprising discoveries and the
inevitable poor choices. Hour-long (maximum)
performances take place simultaneously in five
separate theaters - all within walking distance in the
Tenderloin and downtown theater district - with 15
shows each weeknight and many more all afternoon
and evening Saturday and Sunday, including shows
in outlying areas of Golden Gate Park, at the new
Club Fringe in the Exit Theatre lobby and on
various street corners throughout the area.

Produced by SFFF founders Christina Augello and
Richard Livingston for

the Exit - the hub of Fringe activities - it's a reliably
exciting foray into buyer-beware theatergoing. You
choose your shows based on the write-ups in the
program and the usually more reliable word of
mouth or the instant audience reviews available on
the Fringe Web site. Or you just wait for the six
shows selected for the Best of Fringe reprise later in
September.

There's always a temptation to check out the more
exotic offerings from foreign lands, of course. But
this year I decided to emphasize local companies in
my two brief Fringe forays, Friday evening and
Saturday afternoon - using the festival to check out
some of the talent I never have time to see during
the regular season, but leaving myself room to take
another look at a New York troupe (Banana, Bag
and Bodice) that had intrigued me last year and
sample the Philadelphia performer Kevin Augustine,
whose "10" was generating significant buzz.

It turned out to be a fortuitous choice. Though the
Philadelphia import proved the most exciting of the
six shows I saw, the local offerings provided ample
evidence of continued creative health among the
Bay Area's always astonishingly fertile small
theaters.

Augustine's "10," which I saw Saturday at Il Teatro
450, is an hour of psychologically eerie puppetry
and monologue with an edgily sweet twist. It isn't a
solo performance, though written and staged by
Augustine, who also designed the puppets -
compelling,

life-size foam-rubber figures with the craggy
features of crude stone carvings - and works under
the name Lone Wolf Tribe. Two adept puppeteers
- Jane Catherine Shaw and Carol Binion - bring the
creations to life with a sorrowful gentleness in
unsettling contrast to Augustine's tense, febrile John
Malkovich-like energy.

Augustine portrays a puppeteer whose life is falling
apart. His bride has deserted him at the altar. His
career is self-destructing as he retreats into isolation,
taking out his anger on himself and his creations and
falling apart in a gig at a child's party (an
obstreperous gang of know-it-all party hats).
Working barefoot (his feet manipulate the puppets
as well) in a tuxedo, he creates a compelling
mini-drama as moving as it is creepy. If you want to
catch it, though, you only have two more chances
(Thursday and Sunday) before Augustine takes "10"
back to New York.

My annual walk on the Fringe side began Friday
evening at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre with
another intriguing piece, Cameron Galloway's
"Stew!" Produced by the fledgling (one year old)
Iron Workers Local 202 Theatre Co., it's a comedy
about a TV cooking show that starts out as a wry
satire and develops some rewardingly surreal twists.
It also features the work of an impressive array of
local professionals, from S.F. Mime Troupe veteran
Michael Gene Sullivan, who directs, to the presence
of well-regarded actors like Cynthia Bassham,
Terry Lamb and Megan Blue Stermer in its large
cast.

Galloway's "Stew!" isn't quite finished. The Iron
Workers co-founder, who plays the light-headed
but earnest chef Eustencia Charity, hasn't blended
all her elements well enough yet nor added enough
satiric spice. But "Stew!" rewards with some rich
servings of humor, sharply etched performances
(Bassham's trigger-happy, posterior-proud feminist;
Michael Carreiro and Adrian Elfenbaum's neurotic
psychologists) and increasingly inventive twists -
such as the introduction of guest chef Noam
Chomsky (deftly played by Lamb) to explicate the
economics of paella. Not to mention the most
personable mango puppet in show

business.

Things get even more surreal in "Breton's Dream" at
the tiny Exit Stage Left. Which is just as it should
be. The debut production of the Center for
Imaginary Solutions, "Dream" - written by Sean
Owens and staged by Lisa Giglio - is a fantastical
50-minute romp with all your favorite surrealists. As
a clueless Breton (Michael Stubblefield) dreams and
a giant metronome disgorges visitors, a wild-eyed
Salvador Dali (Christopher Kuckenbaker) melts
watches, a quietly manic Luis Buñuel (Derek
Mutch) measures eyeballs with a razor and a
woebegone Max Ernst (Kuckenbaker) wears the
tattered results of an

attempt to put Man Ray's (Nari Tomassetti) spiked
iron to use.

"Dream" doesn't add up in literal terms and some of
its recurring patterns are unrewarding. But it's an
entertaining, literate diversion with brightly defined
performances (Joan Bernier's officious Tristan Tzara
is worth special mention), clever underwear
costumes by Kathryn Woods and a remarkable
opening mechanical-ballerina dance sequence by
Meredith Crosley.

My Friday evening ended at the Exit's mainstage
with "The Regular Show," a program of 15 short
and eye-blink brief sketches and monologues
written and performed by five members of The
Regular Show, mostly veterans of the Climate
Theatre's popular Writers Who Act program, and
directed by Jane Barrett.

It's an uneven but generally amusing potpourri.
Highlights include some funny shorts by Sharon
Rowley, Randy Sterns' "Video Cafe" vignette as a
woman forced into difficult choices by a
self-absorbed lover (nice work by Euclides
Pereyra), Arwen Anderson's promisingly intriguing,
autobiographical "Pig Roast" and Andrea
Kuchlewski's vivid, funny cult-training session, "I
Got It."

New York's Banana, Bag and Bodice, which I saw
Saturday at Exit Stage Left, turned out to be less of
a non-Bay Area troupe than I'd realized.
Playwright-performer Jason Craig and his fellow
actors - Jessica Jelliffe, Zuzka Sabata and Aaron
Treat - all have roots in San Francisco and
environs. Their "Number 2" is a 45-minute absurdist
exercise in a Beckettian vein, still in need of an
ending, but sharply and engagingly performed by
Jelliffe as the hapless boy-servant to Craig's
morose, dictatorial invalid (like Hamm in
"Endgame") and Sabata and Treat as outrageously
manic, homicidal clowns.

Thunderbird Theater's "The Condensed Works of
Frank Cullen" at the Hansberry, my last stop on the
Fringe, was the least ready for prime time. A loose
spoof of the "Reefer Madness" genre, it's three
sketches by Bryce Allemann, Crissy Follmann
Chavira and director Martin Chavira, based on the
apparently deservedly forgotten work of pulp fiction
writer Cullen. It's all power-mad hypnotists,
predatory lesbians, evil beatniks and the seductive
perils of marijuana and the mambo - not to mention
the terrors of unleashed female sexuality.

Loosely staged and unevenly performed, "The
Condensed Works" is still moderately entertaining,
if only as an example of the benighted attitudes of
yesteryear. If it isn't a prime Fringe experience, it
isn't a disaster. In this kind of aesthetic crap shoot, a
"Stew!," "Breton's Dream" or "Number 2" is a
pretty good roll of the dice. Roll a show like "10"
and you've come up a winner.

The San Francisco Fringe Festival continues
through Sunday with multiple

daily performances by 52 companies in five theaters
and two locations in Golden Gate Park. Complete
performance information is available at (415)
673-3847 and www.sffringe.org.

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