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Sunday July 7th, 2002
By JON KAPLAN
The Fringe aims at all demographics. No matter what your age group or your taste in performance, you can find a corner of the festival that caters to you.
A trio of companies reach out for different kinds of audiences with artistically admirable productions.
ROYAL KNICKERS... AND SNICKERS
If you've got kids and want to give them a theatrical treat, check out Shrimp Magnet Theatre's version of the classic fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes. Blending the tang of today's playground language, some funny jokes and the sugar-coated moral of trusting your own instincts instead of following the herd, the production works for children as well as their parents.
Too often theatre for young audiences - TYA, as educators call it - falls into a kind of lame babysitting, its model Saturday-morning cartoons, with their frantic action and scant plots. On the stage, this can translate into actors running through the audience screaming hysterically, trying with high energy to distract kids from a show's lack of narrative interest.
Shrimp Magnet never stoops to that kind of lazy theatre. Based on Centre Island (when the current strike isn't keeping ferry service from delivering audiences), the company relies on zestful performances but couples them with strong storytelling and a realization that they have to hold parents as well as children for 45 minutes of theatre. The group appeared at the Fringe two years ago in Jeremy's Germs, in which young viewers learned about their sometimes icky insides by following a character into his own body - think a pint-sized version of The Incredible Journey - and proved they understand how their target viewers think and feel.
Like Jeremy's Germs, The Emperor's New Clothes makes confident use of the audience, sometimes literally drawing them into the action and always engaging their imagination. Here the hero is Robin (the effervescent Kate Keenan), assistant potato cleaner in the royal palace, who saves the emperor's ass by pointing out the trickery of Biff (Cleve Sauer), formerly her potato-cleaning boss before he turned himself into a chi-chi French designer.
Robin connects with the dumb, goofy, lovable emperor (Christopher Schneider) over their mutual interest in fishing, teaching him to stand up to an imperious royal adviser (Lesley Halferty, who also directs).
There are several good jokes for parents along the way, and some clever physical comedy. But what truly cements the bond between the players of Shrimp Magnet and their audience is their infectious sense of fun, a spirit that viewers of all ages can't help but share.
SECOND SIGHT
Adults will leave their children at home to catch Alexis Bernier's Breaking Character, one of the most thoughtful and unsettling shows at this year's Fringe.
Its single character, Jacqui, is an optometrist who discovers while examining people's eyes that she can see into their souls. At first addictive, the gift becomes more like a curse, especially when she turns it on her husband in a relationship that's seen better days.
In Bernier's spare writing, a few lines of text can suggest several emotional undercurrents. There's poetry here, though not of the traditional imagistic sort.
In frequent collaborator Gina Clayton, author/director Bernier has an actor who understands both the nuances of the writing and how to convey its layered meanings. The scenes are often short, the mood shifts suggested not only by lighting but also by Clayton's subtle turns from drunken, cynical wife to awestruck discoverer of her talent and eventually to uncomfortable delver into others' psyches. She moves almost imperceptibly from tone to tone, playing with the sensual, the mystical and the commonplace in equal measure. It's amazing how she can roll pain, fear, hurt and surprise into one statement.
There's some ambiguity in the text and aspects of the ending that aren't easy to pry open, but with a script and a performance this clear-sighted, Breaking Character is a splendid piece of theatre.
ABSURD ANTICS
Life dead-ended and too ridiculous for you these days? Try a bit of theatrical absurdity.
Writer Stan Rogal knows how to translate his poetic imagination onto the stage, as he's proven in earlier festival shows with Adam Nashman. Here the two co-direct Rogal's Blood Sonata, a self-described dark comedy that owes a debt to Beckett and Albee plays of the 50s and 60s, the kind of drama known as Theatre of the Absurd.
Don't look for a direct storyline or rational characters here; you won't find them any more than you would in Beckett's Waiting For Godot or Albee's An American Dream.
Mom and Pop (Cathy Smith and Derek Keurvorst) sit at the kitchen table playing snippets of songs and dialogue on a tape recorder and reacting in repeated slo-mo action to what they're hearing. Into this world - where the sounds of breathing and even silent pauses have connotations, and examining one's hands fills emotionally empty days - walks a young soldier with a gun. Their son? Maybe... maybe not. (Fill in touches of Albee's Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? here.)
The pair interact with each other and with this young man until the narrative tables are turned again.
The production doesn't always work - the segments of the young boy growing up are obvious and go on too long - but the cast handles the material with a real sense of style and dedication even to the quiet moments, in which they suggest inner lives tinged with yearning.
Here's proof that Theatre of the Absurd isn't dead.
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