CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--So there I was, sitting in the front row of a little theater on Santa Monica Blvd when a rolled-up pair of socks came flying through the air and hit me in the back of the head. I wasn't alone, since the actor on stage was himself getting bombarded with socks. Within a few minutes, the stage was covered with socks. Thus begins my account of this year's Hollywood Fringe festival.
Take three or four hundred theatrical producers and directors, some of them young and a few of them very young. Give each an opportunity to develop a play or a musical and then present it to the public over the course of a month. Make sure that the ticket price is low, and see what develops. That's the Fringe.
Technically speaking, the weekend of June 2 represented the preview stage of the festival. It was so early in the process that when I dropped in on the festival headquarters, the staff were sitting on the floor, sawing and hammering. Apparently this year's HQ was not quite in shape for the opening night party. The official opening will take place midweek.
Still, that didn't intimidate the large number of actors and directors who were presenting previews. In order to sample the breadth of this year's festival, I attended a one-man presentation of a serious subject, the boffo-yucks show involving audience sock throwing, and a semi-serious melodrama about the origin of Dracula.
First, let's talk of the socks. Easy Targets is presented by a group that calls itself the Burglars of Hamm. The underlying idea is that some performances can be so bad that the audience wants nothing more than to punish the actors and the author. I certainly know that feeling. The theater company describes the show as follows: "Easy Targets is for every audience member who has sat in the dark at a bad play thinking they now know what prison must be like."
So the Burglars present four short one-man pieces (on other nights they present woman shows). Audience members are invited to throw rolled up socks at the actor. In fact, the company rents out the use of the throwing-socks at two pairs for a buck.
Thus we were treated to a one-man show consisting of a guy in a chair (Hugo Armstrong) pretending to be a truck driver reminiscing about long haul trucking, blowing the big horn for kids in passing cars, and musing on the meaning of life and procreation. Armstrong worked the character, managing to sound both sanctimonious and a little stupid.
The hit of the show, at least for me, was Albert Dayan, who walked out on stage and very seriously presented an argument for why white men are the ones who deserve sympathy. He kept in character so well that the playlet became a little scary. A lot of socks were thrown. Being in the front row, I have to question the throwing ability of some of the folks in the back, what with socks dropping all around me and whizzing past my ear. However, neither myself nor the actors were injured in the making of this show.
Ingersoll Speaks! was an excellent example of a serious subject done as a short play. Robert Ingersoll was a late 19th century free thinker -- that is to say, an atheist -- who served as an officer in the Civil War, made a successful career as an attorney in Illinois, and ultimately took to giving public speeches to advance his views.
"Fear drops on its knees and believes. It is only courage that can think."
As author and performer Ernest Kearney points out, Ingersoll's speeches from the late 1800s could be given today, so far advanced are they in terms of human equality, sexual equality, and opposition to capital punishment. Kearney points us to volumes of Ingersoll speeches now collected on the internet.
The preview performance included about 30 minutes of a reading that is expected to go about 45 minutes in the regular performances. Ingersoll Speaks is a chance to become acquainted with a man and orations that affected Mark Twain and many other influential people of his generation.
Blood on their chins and blood on the audience
Finally, I attended The Rise and Fall of Dracula. This is the brainchild of Melissa Ortiz and Cassandra Ambe, who were previously featured in multiple plays in San Pedro. Both have roots in the immersive theater experience which involves the audience moving from room to room within an extensive set, and occasional interaction, both verbal and physical, between the actors and the audience. For example, recent immersive performances both in San Pedro and here in Hollywood involved audience members being invited to step away from their chairs and dance with the cast. In this Dracula, the set includes much of an old building including a claustrophobic hallway, a couple of cramped rooms, and the main stage.
What's interesting about this version of the story is that the authors attempt to root the Dracula mythology in an older mythology so that the vampire story makes a little sense. In this version, the person who is to become the killer vampire is a young girl in ancient Greece whose relatives are killed by invading Macedonians. In her grief, she is visited by one of the goddesses (the Keres) who oversee violent death. Of her own volition and through pain induced by the goddess, the girl is transformed into the vampire. The script is fairly clever in the way it takes its time, introducing the aspects of the vampire mythology along the way, such as the notion of transforming oneself into a flying creature.
The script then introduces a swerve whereby the young Dracula girl, having been taken in by a loving family, shows her hypnotic powers in draining blood from the father and his daughter. The remainder of the play becomes classic melodrama in which the daughter becomes the vampire's antagonist.
What's curious about this depiction is that Cassandra Ambe as Madam Dracula manages to skirt the line between detested abomination and sympathetic victim. Sam Flemming, Corissa Pacillas Smith, Sarah Rodriguez, Gerard Moore, and Mary Emfinger previously performed for the TE Repertoire company and translated their earlier immersive theatre training into a well performed adaptation of the Dracula story.
In one afternoon, the Fringe presented me with three very different approaches to theater, all worth seeing, but all having a different effect on the viewer in terms of laughs, chills, and deep thought. We'll see how the rest of the Fringe goes over its June 8-25 run.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
