At the 12th New York International Fringe Festival, which started Aug. 8, neither the 202 productions nor the 20 venues that host them will set new records for Gotham's annual theatrical grab bag. Looking at the programming, however, beyond the usual hit-or-miss oddities and patience-testing schemes in experimentation, small trends may be observed. There's as much work citing great literature — Euripides, Shakespeare, Carroll, Nin, Plath, Faulkner, Sontag — as work that might be called "litter-ature," honoring such souls as Anna Nicole Smith, Perez Hilton, Britney Spears, and Blanche DuBois. Here are eight actors who created their own works for this year's Fringe, which runs through Aug. 24.
Desiree Burch
52 Man Pickup isn't about interstate commerce. It refers, says actor-writer Desiree Burch, to all the men she has slept with.
As it begins, she proffers a deck of cards, each with data on those men — "ascribed by rank," as she puts it. The audience picks cards; Burch tells tales. "It's my sex life played out," she explains. "I wanted to take stock of sex in the city. It's pervasive for people in major cities where there's flesh commerce. You get used to it, but I didn't want to."
Instead, she says, 52 Man Pickup makes theatre immediate. "Sex is important because there's something sacred to it," Burch says. "Anyone who's had it admits that. But just as the impeccability of language gets erased by how we use it, so it is with sex — we take it for granted."
Burch, a performer with Off-Off-Broadway's New York Neo-Futurists for several years, admires the improv group's "aesthetic of putting your real life forward. People don't get directness and intimacy from TV. This is the most intimate I've been — even after my experiences. This attracts me as a creative being."
Performances: Thu., Aug. 14, 7:45 p.m.; Mon., Aug. 18, 9:15 p.m.; Wed., Aug. 20, 5:30 p.m.; Thu., Aug. 21, 10 p.m.; Sat., Aug. 23, 3 p.m., at the Jazz Gallery, 290 Hudson St., NYC. Info: www.52manpickup.com.
Hogan Gorman
Outside Off-Broadway's Public Theater in March 2004, actor Hogan Gorman was hit by a car. She had no health insurance. "My head took out the windshield, and when the driver slammed the brakes, I flew 10 feet to the pavement," she says. Despite life-threatening injuries, Gorman — who's never acted at the Public — now sees irony in her plight. "So close yet so far, right?" she asks.
Facing short-term memory loss early in her three-year recovery — "Luckily, I'm blond," she quips — Gorman began jotting down her experiences as a critical-care case without coverage. "I'd tell stories to my friends, and they'd kill themselves laughing," she says. After taking a solo-show class, Hot Cripple was born. "It's my story but also the story of millions who slip through our dysfunctional healthcare system. Lots of people don't know if they haven't been through it." The hospital that treated her initially, for example, cruelly released her that night, compounding her trauma.
"It took three years to live it, a year to write it," Gorman says. "But I find this is cathartic. Thank God I'm an artist."
Performances: Fri., Aug. 8, 9:45 p.m.; Mon., Aug. 11, 4:45 p.m.; Wed., Aug. 13, 7:30 p.m.; Fri., Aug. 22, 4 p.m.; Sun., Aug. 24, noon, at the CSV Cultural and Educational Center, 107 Suffolk St., NYC. Info: www.hotcripple.com.
Gail Langstroth
Eurythmy, Gail Langstroth says, is "the art of movement in which we make visible the sound of speech. Say, 'The bird flew over the mountain.' In any language — Spanish, say — I'd make that image visible through the sounds the language gives me. I wouldn't do it as mimed movement. I'm shaping air. I make that poetry line visible."
Langstroth, who first demonstrated eurythmy at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1978, created Oneword — An Extended Poetree, which is part biography, part paean to her pursuit. It's also her first work stateside after years of overseas projects.
Creating eurythmy is "like any of the arts," Langstroth says. "You grind away and learn the basics. The bottom line is: Does it speak or does it not? As you're working with music or text, it wants to be movement that speaks and sings. So, in a classic way, we'll have somebody recite a text, I'll move at the same time, or we'll have someone play guitar and I'll make the music visible as it's played." She notes that "real eurythmy is actually silent, so, really, I'm fine-tuning my research with Oneword. I've been doing it since I was 21."
Performances: Sat., Aug. 9, 12:15 p.m.; Sun., Aug. 10, 7:45 p.m.; Wed., Aug. 13, 3 p.m.; Fri., Aug. 15, 8 p.m.; Tue., Aug. 19, 5:15 p.m., at the Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street, 45 Bleecker St., NYC. Info: www.wordmoves.com.
Tim Ryan Meinelschmidt
In 1995, L.A. lawyer Thomas Fox mounted a play featuring actor Tim Ryan Meinelschmidt. "I was intrigued that he was a criminal defense attorney and the sole investor in this play," the actor recalls. Fox and Meinelschmidt then became collaborators: Meinelschmidt's prior Fringe piece, 2004's All the Help You Need, was mounted by Fox. Now they're returning with Johnny Law, Courtroom Crusader, about a streetwise, savvy lawyer who's seen it all.
In addition to Johnny Law, Meinelschmidt plays several other characters. The title character is "on recess from a trial and having to make final arguments," he says. "Sitting in a hotel room, he goes through some of his cases looking for something to draw from."
Meinelschmidt knows "the stage isn't a courtroom but entertainment. That's why the meat of the play is like what Hemingway said about bullfighters: Young ones have great reverence for it, open hearts about it; old ones know a 2,000-pound animal is coming at them and are cynical; then there's the third type, like Johnny Law, who began reverential, then cynical, then regained their reverence. Those are exciting to watch."
Performances: Sat., Aug. 9, 1:45 p.m.; Thu., Aug. 14, 9:30 p.m.; Fri., Aug. 15, 7:30 p.m.; Sun., Aug. 17, 6:30 p.m.; Fri., Aug. 22, 5 p.m., at the Schaeberle Studio Theatre, 41 Park Row, 12th floor, NYC. Info: www.johnnylawesq.net.
Mark Sam Rosenthal
"I've always fixated on Blanche DuBois — she's always in my head," asserts actor Mark Sam Rosenthal, who wrote and stars in Blanche Survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire.
So when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Rosenthal, a seventh-generation Louisianan, aimed to honor his hometown folk. "Half my family is from there — all were displaced or lost their homes; all took on water," he says. "Oddly, I think my response to tragedy is comedy, so not too long after Katrina, an image popped in my mind: Blanche arriving at the Superdome as an evacuee. For me, it's a way into the horror. I didn't write it for a while because it was too soon."
The show is not, Rosenthal cautions, "a drag show. I'm in a wig, but it's couched so I'm this guy who comes back to his ruined home and discovers this magic valise. Amidst flood-washed debris, it lets him retrieve props and take Blanche on. It's also a delicate balance of tragic and comic — my feelings about New Orleans are still angry. Blanche gets fucked by the FEMA bureaucracy. It's a way to cry out about what happened."
Performances: Sat., Aug. 9, 7:15 p.m.; Mon., Aug. 11, 3 p.m.; Thu., Aug. 14, 11:45 p.m.; Sun., Aug. 17, 9:15 p.m.; Sat., Aug. 23, 1:30 p.m., at the Players Theatre, 115 MacDougal St., NYC. Info: www.blanchesurviveskatrina.com.
Mat Sanders and Guerrin Gardner
Summer 2006: Outside the American Girl Place store in Manhattan, actors in the store's shows staged a strike to protest working conditions and show support for having Actors' Equity bargain for them. More headlines followed, with actors Mat Sanders and Guerrin Gardner usually front and center. Now Sanders and Gardner have devised Sandy the Dandy and Charlie McGee: A Case Study in Harsh Realities, which parodies what they believe are the substandard ethics of their now-former employer.
After taking a writing class, Sanders and Gardner began developing a musical called Squirty Poo but fast jettisoned it, retaining only the idea of a doll-based parody. "We began performing for our friends, and then we realized we had these characters who are so naive, who work so well with the doll-store controversy," Gardner says.
"You know, it's about that feeling of moving to New York and being willing to take any job that comes your way to make it," says Sanders. "We've changed the names of the dolls to protect them," Gardner adds, "since the main thing is to have a good laugh. It's sort of a unique vaudeville. We have this bit where we poke fun at the fact that people will do startling, absurd things to get a casting director's attention."
Performances: Fri., Aug. 8, 7:45 p.m.; Tue., Aug. 12, 5 p.m.; Wed., Aug. 13, 10 p.m.; Sun., Aug. 17, 9:30 p.m.; Sat., Aug. 23, 3 p.m., at the Deluxe at Spiegelworld, Pier 17, South Street Seaport, 89 South St., NYC. Info: www.toomuchery.com.
Cara Yeates
Canadian actor-playwright Cara Yeates went to India to write a play. "Bollywood intrigued me," she says. "I'd spoken to people about Bombay, being picked up on the street by scouts. The first night I was there, I get tapped on the shoulder. This guy says, 'Hey, do you want to be in a Bollywood film?' So I spent a month traveling around, which snowballed to being in Bombay for four months." Welcome to Bye Bye Bombay.
Yeates, who calls herself Indo-Canadian, says she'd audition for a role, "and the next thing I'd be learning full-page dialogue. Next thing, I'm guest-starring on a TV show for five days. What's unique about Indian culture is their willingness to embrace foreigners." The show also covers casting directors' perceptions. "I got lots of people asking about my ethnicity," she says.
Yet Bye Bye Bombay "is also about my willingness to say yes," Yeates adds. "Doors opened; I got a work visa. The people in India are the biggest misconception. You can meet people who'll take advantage of you, but I was amazed by how much people took care of and helped you. I'd meet people one day, and the next I'd stay with them."
Performances: Sun., Aug. 10, 10 p.m.; Thu., Aug. 14, 3 p.m.; Fri., Aug. 15, 3 p.m.; Sat., Aug. 16, 9:45 p.m.; Thu., Aug. 21, 7:30 p.m., at the CSV Cultural and Educational Center, 107 Suffolk St., NYC. Info: www.carayeates.com.
Tickets to all shows: (866) 468-7619 or www.fringenyc.org.