FRINGE REVIEW: Ghost Sonata

Hugh Trimble, in particular, is riveting as the extraordinarily sinister Old Man.

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FRINGE REVIEW: Ghost Sonata

POSTED: Monday, September 10, 2012, 6:10 PM

Every year, there's hundreds and hundreds of performances at the Philly Fringe and Live Arts Festival, and unless it's one of the big shows, it's sometimes hard to tell what you're going to get. Here at Critical Mass we're sending writers to as many shows as we possibly can for 75 pocket-sized reviews over the course of the fest. Check back in with us at On The Fringe every day for real talk on what these things actually are!

SHOW: Ghost Sonata

GROUP: Homunculus, Inc.

GENRE: Theater

ATTENDED: Sun., Sept. 9, 2 p.m.

CLOSES: Sept. 16

BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: A vampiric cook. A mummy in a closet. The ghost of a wet-nurse. An elderly enigma set on revenge. And a messianic student who stumbles into the collapsing web of cruelty, greed, and lies uniting these characters. Join the struggle for salvation in this eccentric and immersive adaption of Strindberg.

WE THINK: The dissonance between the grim Ghost Sonata and the spectacular late-summer weather may have been too much to overcome. The cast bears no fault for alienating the audience; Hugh Trimble, in particular, is riveting as the extraordinarily sinister Old Man. As The Student, Patrick Scheid earns our empathy, which should make it all the more jolting when we learn the depth of the horrors visited upon him and the secret society he longs to join.

But maybe the company set its expectations of the audience too high for its “immersive” adaptation of August Strindberg’s 1908 chamber play. We could believe, with little trouble, that the creepy residents of a cursed condo complex belonged in the darkness of PhilaMOCA, but though the room had been staged to erase the physical boundaries between cast and crowd, we 21st-century dwellers were feeling way too good to fully settle into the space, and too eager to flee back into the sunny afternoon the second the house lights came up.

—M.J. Fine

Posted by M.J. Fine @ 6:10 PM Permalink | Post a comment

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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