Kisses and tomatoes at the Fringe Festival

By Eric George Tauber

SAN DIEGO — Another Fringe Festival has come and gone, 11 days of ‘eyeball busting’ shows at fourteen venues around San Diego. If you’re not familiar, “fringe” refers to theater that’s a little too “out there” for a regular theater season.  Many are small shows that travel light. Some are autobiographical. Many are works in progress, finding their legs like a wobbly foal. It’s always a mixed bag, ranging from brilliant to bupkes, from self-indulgent shyring to touching tales well told. Reactions range from blowing kisses to throwing tomatoes. I couldn’t see everything, but I saw quite a bit and here are my impressions…

Josephine: A big kiss to Tymisha Harris’ portrait of the legendary Josephine Baker.  With an old-fashioned microphone and a sultry set of pipes, we were seduced into the world of this jazz legend. In a day when most “colored” women cleaned houses, show-biz was Baker’s ticket out.

As the toast of Paris, Baker was famous for her racy performances in scanty costumes she barely wore. Harris wasn’t shy about presenting Baker in all of her bare skinned beauty and this writer is not complaining.

Inana: Less sophisticated was this re-telling of a Sumerian myth. The pedestrian script felt like something written by a middle school teacher at a pagan parochial school. When a priestess danced in the temples beseeching the gods’ aid, the moves were so boring that I didn’t blame the gods for not tripping over themselves to help her.

I Got Guns was a riot, a poignant lampoon taking aim at a serious issue. Commedia dell’ Arte is an old and timeless genre. In its heyday, troupes trekked from village to village, evoking howls and belly laughs with stock characters, slapstick physicality, ribald jokes and social satire.

All too frequent events inspired I Got Guns by Sanctuary Stage. A lemonade stand is turned into a gun show -requiring no background checks or waiting periods- as they pawn off disabled guns to a crooked dealer. The jokes came fast and furious with a pointed edge to wake us up to something that is no laughing matter.

Distorted Reality (and fuzzy math): Kevin Viner is a “mentalist, magician and comedian.”  With uncanny accuracy, he guessed the names and birth times –down to the minute- of audience members’ children. He guessed random numbers from a phone book –skipping the page of escorts- and linked together three wedding bands.

How he did these things and more, one can only guess. I’d always thought of telepathy as the stuff of science fiction. After watching Kevin Viner … Who knows?

The Black and The Jew Go Buddhist! SDJW likes to  have something Jewish in every article, so I came to this little darling in the poorly ventilated underground space at Rosewood 5.

Mark Epstein and Naima Hassan have been married for 30 years and it’s been a bumpy ride. They tell their story, speaking very frankly about money, sex, race and religion. Using Buddhist principles (which can also be found in Judaism) they’ve healed the exposed wounds in their relationship and grown together as a couple.

The Hamlet Comedy Hour gets my biggest tomato right in the kisser. Oy vey iz mir! Hamlet melodramatically butchered his soliloquy. Gertrude looked like she belonged in a mental ward and Ophelia –clad in a leopard print jacket- came off like a call girl … with an Adam’s apple. I kept glancing at my watch wishing these people would just hurry up and die so that I could get the hell out of there.

Where I Got Guns used comedy to provoke action in response to tragedy, Naked Shakespeare’s efforts at comedy were just tragic.

Hateful Hands: I knew that I’d kick myself if I missed this. Jacob Sarovsky is one of the most talented young puppeteers I’ve ever seen. He and the Ellipsoid Players combined live actors, masks, moving mouth and shadow puppets for their quirky adaptation of “The Scottish Play.”

Macbeth, when he speaks in his own voice, is an actor. He reverts to a puppet when he’s being manipulated.  While the effect could be a bit cartoonish, the concept made for an innovative show.

Nations of San Diego was a celebration of cultures in dance. Brightly arrayed in traditional attire, 20 different cultural groups presented traditional dances from their respective corners of the world. I was really impressed when three young men busted some moves in Bollywood hip-hop, embracing both tradition and modern innovation. With folksy charm, Nations of San Diego is a celebration of life, honoring both our distinctive cultural identities as well as our common humanity. And couldn’t we all use more of that?

To learn more about the Fringe, and to make sure you don’t miss out next year, go to www.sdfringe.org and get on their mailing list.

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Tauber is a freelance writer specializing in coverage of the arts.  He may be contacted via eric.tauber@sdjewishworld.com.  Comments intended for publication in the space below MUST be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the United States.)

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