Solo Tales of Terror: Lovecraft & Stoker
Quick quiz: What best defines the Philly Fringe? Is it (A) mind-twisting experiences, (B) risqué comedy, (C) emotional explorations, (D) rickety folding chairs, or (E) solo performances?
The answer: E. One-man (or -woman) plays are a Fringe staple. Intimate and portable, they allow a single artist — typically both writer and performer — to reach an audience without sponsorship by an established organization. One-person shows are in-your-face experiences, perfect for nontraditional spaces like bars and art galleries, and often secret-revealing confessionals. They can be fiction or non, funny, intense or both. This year's Fringe features about 20.
Autobiographical solo shows include Melissa McBain's Going Back Naked, which shares the story of her mother, a Depression-era child star who had a risky affair with a young seminarian, became a concert pianist and sold Bibles door-to-door; Philadelphia resident Jay Nachman's My Dad Is Now Ready for His Sponge Bath, which deals with his late father's lung cancer with humor and heart; and NYU professor Jeffrey Stanley's comedy about family secrets, dream interpretation, Nietzsche and acute alcoholism, Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead, featuring live Ouija board spirit world communication with audience volunteers.
Cymande Lewis' My Name is Sam Johnson recalls her formative Vermont years as the only black student in a one-room schoolhouse, and her return to Philadelphia in search of her birth mother. "I began writing this show," Lewis explains, "to find my voice and make peace with some of the more difficult parts of my life." Monica Day uses movement, music and ritual to explore the lifelong stigma of her conservative Catholic father's belief that she was a "whore risk" in Song of the Sacred Whore. Amber Womack's Should I Be Sweet? is listed under Music in the festival guide, but Womack shares her journey from small-town Texas country singer to NYC opera and cabaret star in story as well as song.
Boax Zippor
Paper Cut
Original fictional works include Israeli artist Yael Rasooly's Paper Cut, in which a lonely secretary acts out her daydreams with cut-out pictures and random objects in an adventure that's both hilarious and harrowing. Siblings M. Craig Getting and Jillian Taylor wrote Straw, Stick, Brick, in which Eric Scotolati plays a man building a monument to himself. "It's about what we leave behind," Getting explains, "how we leave our mark." Big Star California, by NYC's Missing Bolts Productions, backs a young woman's life-changing road-trip story with live rock music.
Eric Singel's hilarious The Wedding Consultant, which played the Fringe in 2006, returns in Jose Aviles' fine-tuned production, featuring Singel as a host of characters involved in a gay wedding, including his locally famous alter ego, Iris Holcombe, as the title character.
Solo works exist as plays, but can also be adapted from literature. Nevermore features three Edgar Allen Poe classics: John Devennie performs the little-known story "Hop-Frog," while Christopher Reinig shares "The Tell-Tale Heart" and Matthew Celly performs "The Raven," all infused with music befitting the venue: The Hard Rock Café. Magic Circle Theater Co. provides more spookiness with Solo Tales of Terror: Lovecraft & Stoker. Chris Morse performs the former's "The Statement of Randolph Carter," and Josh Hitchens embodies the latter's "Dracula."
Mark Kennedy's Checkers imagines a character in Witold Gombrowicz' 1938 absurdist classic Ivona, Princess of Burgundia. Checkers is a hapless servant who, Kennedy explains, "never quite fully enters a room before being ordered out of it." His play asks, "How do you speak to your true love when you've never even spoken?" 1828.1 Production Co.'s Hello America ... My Name Is Jimmy Baldwin brings the famous author of Another Country and Go Tell It on the Mountain back to life in Robert H. Miller's script.
The most recognizable playwrights with solo shows are Neil LaBute (also represented by Room6 Theatre's This Is How It Goes) and Sam Shepard, author of Buried Child. LaBute's Bash: Latter Day Plays, presented by RileSmith Arts, contains the confessions of three essentially good Mormons — played by Joe Matyas, Pascale Smith and Josh Totora — who commit bizarrely violent crimes. New City Stage Co. presents Shepard's solo pieces Savage/Love and Tongues, both written with the late Joseph Chaikin and performed by Russ Widdall.
The Fringe may provide adventures, scandals, laughs and plenty of tearful performances. But true success comes in knowing you alone can keep your audience rapt for an hour in those damn chairs.
For tickets and information, call 215-413-1318 or visit livearts-fringe.org.
