Traveling home from work one afternoon, I snuggled into my curiously and inexplicably stained SEPTA seat, grateful for the soon-to-be Saturday night off. As my bus hurtled south, I watched the on-comers and off-goers with halfhearted interest. That is, until a woman wearing what had to be a Victoria’s Secret nightgown and a man in a bedazzled fishing hat and Hawaiian shirt pulled a rickshaw onto the bus. (I kid not. A full on, wooden rickshaw that now blocked the center aisle of all movement. I have photographic evidence, if you don’t believe me.) And as the woman in the negligee screamed at Michael, the fish-out-of-water with bobs attached to his head, to “not get that thing near her body,” I thought to myself: “Only in Philly.”
This saying has been uttered many times throughout my five-year stint in the city. What with baseball fans being tasered and publicly transported rickshaws… Not to mention Beckett, Hemingway, Chinese opera, Bogotá, Juliet, fairytales, and John Wilkes Booth all in two weeks time. Why, only in Philly, my friends. The Philadelphia Fringe and Live Arts Festival, to be exact.
The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe is an internationally recognized venue of performing arts showcasing innovative and original performing artists from Philadelphia and around the world. This festival, running from September 3–18, 2010, brings to venues all across Philadelphia, world, US, and Philly premieres, as well as fresh, contemporary looks at classic pieces. With almost 200 performances to choose from, September is, undoubtedly, the month for Philly Theatre.
In the first of two overviews of the Live Arts Festival (henceforth aptly renamed as LAF), we will take a brief look at four theatrical performances headed our way.
Pig Iron Theatre Company is no stranger to LAF. Their production during last year’s festival, WELCOME TO YUBA CITY, has received six Barrymore award nominations including “Outstanding Overall Production of a Play,” “Outstanding Direction of a Play,” and “Outstanding Ensemble in a Play.” And this year’s CANKERBLOSSOM, the company’s first production for all ages, is as highly anticipated as ever.
CANKERBLOSSOM, a “dark fairytale for kids aged 9 to 90,” is the first in a series of projects inspired by Shakespeare’s A MIDSUMMER’S NIGHT DREAM. It features a collaboration between director Dan Rothenberg and puppeteer artist and cartoonist Beth Nixon; the two bring Pig Iron’s trademark physicality alongside live music, video projection, and stop motion animation.
The fairytale begins when an ordinary couple opens their front door, revealing a two-dimensional, completely flat child. The young lovers grow to love the child as their own, until one day the baby is stolen away to Flatworld, a sinister land far away from our 3D reality. To save their adopted child, the couple must now enter a world so unlike our own…
Previews for CANKERBLOSSOM begin September 1, 2010. The show opens on September 4 and runs until the 18th at the Christ Church Neighborhood House at 20 North American Street. For more information, go to www.pigiron.org
Back from last year’s well-received FATEBOOK (Who is that pretty girl playing June?), New Paradise Laboratories in conjunction with NYC’s The Riot Group present an all-new comedy about the “delirium and danger in American extremism.” FREEDOM CLUB hops about in time from Lincoln-assassin and Shakespearean actor John Wilkes Booth to the year 2015 where a Virginian group of radicals begin to come loose around the edges. This dream-reality hurtling toward destiny combines the best of NPL’s originative physicality and The Riot Group’s armament of language. Written by Adriano Shaplin and directed by Whit McLaughlin, FREEDOM CLUB explores unsolvable and irreversible tensions in American politics from the viewpoint of a presidential killer and a group of left-wing extremists.
Previews for FREEDOM CLUB begin September 1, 2010, with opening night on September 3. The show runs until September 11, 2010 at The University of the Arts’ Arts Bank at 601 South Broad Street (Broad and South Streets). For more information, visit www.newparadiselaboratories.org and www.theriotgroup.com .
In a world premiere production, Charlotte Ford presents CHICKEN, an absurdist clown play that explores the thrill and darkness of fear. “We live in a pretty scary city and world,” Ford explains. “Gun violence in Philly, home invasions, terrorism… I’m interested in how much of our fear is irrational and how much is well-founded. How does our fear help and hurt us?”
With three actors, (one a cross-dresser, one an Elvis lover, and a “she-beast”) CHICKEN throws political correctness down the drain as it explores illogical revenge stratagems, petty hatreds, and anxious amusement at another's behalf. CHICKEN magnifies our everyday darkness and blows it up to mythic proportions and juxtaposes it with clowning and humor.
CHICKEN is a limited engagement, running for only seven performances beginning on September 3 until September 6, 2010. Performances are being held at the Live Arts Studio at 919 North 5th Street (5th and Poplar).
Coming to the US from one of my favorite countries, Gare St Lazare Players Ireland brings overseas the Philadelphia premiere of FIRST LOVE by Samuel Beckett. This one-man show transforms what was originally a novella into a dynamic performance filled with “Beckettian perversity.”
In FIRST LOVE, a young man, played by Conor Lovett, explores his first and only love after being banished from his family home. Combining the tragic emotions of a premier romance and the driest of humor, Lovett portrays a man who “says terrible things in a beautiful way and beautiful things in a terrible way.”
Performed at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre at 480 South Broad Street (on the corner of Broad and Lombard), FIRST LOVE runs for four performances only (September 3 through September 5, 2010).
For more information on Gare St Lazare Players Ireland and Samuel Beckett’s FIRST LOVE, go to http://www.garestlazareplayersireland.com
For information and tickets for any of these shows or any of the other countless performances at this year’s Live Arts and Fringe Festival, call (215) 413-1318 or visit www.livearts-fringe.org. All weeknight and Sunday-night Live Arts Festival shows are $25. Performances on weekend afternoons or Saturday nights are $30. Keep in mind: The more Festival shows you see, the more you save – buy tickets to 2 or more shows and save 20%. Students and Festival goers 25 and younger: $15.
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