goestoshow

This one has a little of something for everyone. As far as I understand it, this play was written based on the title. I’ve seen several plays I think were written that way in past years and it always seems to work out well.

Obviously, though, these ones are never all wins. I was least impressed by the fairly slow and kind of depressing story about a man whose wife had left him. Its low energy compared to the other plays left me unclearon what had happened at any given point, as most of the action was off stage (and even the KILL part of the story was left kind of ambiguous).

But my favorite was possibly the best most concentrated awesome I’ve seen at the Fringe yet this year: A neighborhood of people who get together for a sexy games night where they play Russian Roulette in their underwear. The characters hate each other in a super hilarious way that really fits in with the game they’re playing. At the end we get to see a Quantum Immortality vision of all the end results of the game in which you discover that while the players may lose, the viewer wins in all scenarios.

The only problem I had was that they started late and ended even later. It was the first showing and they have some complicated stage tech (a rotating wall/door/window that they redress behind the action for every skit), so it’s likely this’ll tighten up, but I had to run out on the well-deserved standing O to get to the next play I was going to see. You might not want to leave 20 minutes between this play and the next.

This play features the Zombie Apocalypse, an imitation of the noises Beaker (from the Muppets) would make while having sex, and a full on living room brawl between four characters who don’t seem to like each other very much.

I don’t know how to express its awesome side better than just listing those things. At many points, this play is just purely fun.

It has a dark side, though. You have to wonder at points why these characters even know each other, let alone why they would invite each other over to watch Labyrinth (or why any of them would be the type to want to watch Labyrinth in the first place). You get the impression it’s supposed to say something about the main two characters and the repressed homoerotic bond they seem to share, but it never really gets fleshed out.

Mostly, though, this play is a fun romp. It starts really slow, but picks up well enough after a few minutes. It’ll make you laugh.

The premise of this play is that the main character (unfortunately named Richard Cox) buys a Real Doll that has motorized and computerized parts. Dick is sort of like Lars from Lars and the Real Girl or the main character of 40 Year Old Virgin in being completely incapable of having a relationship with the opposite gender, and he seems to see a sex-bot as his only way to have a meaningful relationship with anyone but his mother.

We see the story in two parts intertwined: His childhood and the progression of his masturbatory habits and his life as an adult with his sex-bot, who evolves through software and hardware upgrades from a rudimentary dummy who can barely pronounce his name (‘Rich-Hard’) to a fully grown girl with desires and attitudes of her own.

The emphasis is, unfortunately in my opinion, placed heavily on the childhood story. It’s hard to watch this play without feeling like you’re being extremely voyeuristic into the author’s life. You feel a bit like Ceiling Cat, watching as he humps everything from magazine pages to his television (‘ZAP’) to his family’s couch cushions. I have trouble recommending this play mostly because it’s really hard to know how someone will take this.

The adult portion of the story, where we see his interactions with the bot and his mother (his bot eventually starts drawing baths for his mother) is, in my opinion, the real meat of the story, but every time it gets going we get yanked back to his wanking.

If you can handle that, though, by all means go. It is very funny. It’s just that it’s funny in a sort of sad and disturbing way.

The ending is both touching and extremely sad. I don’t want to give it away, though.

Addition tells the story of a young gay couple who decide they want a threesome to spice up their love life. The scenario gets a little out of hand, though, as they dive down the rabbit hole of polyamory into what they hope is a stable 3 person relationship.

The really brave thing about this play, is how it diverges from most media about alternative relationship structures by being a relatively light hearted happy story. My experience with stories about this sort of thing is that they tend to be morality plays.

It’s also interesting that the play is centered around gay men, as I think the standard image of a multipartner relationship tends to involve one-man many-women. It’s in danger of falling into the trap of perpetuating notions of gay male promiscuity, but manages to avoid it through the earnest nature of the characters. They never seem to be slutty, they just seem to have fallen into a new form of monogamy by accident.

Generally, I’d be a little more down on this play for its possibly over-optimistic ending, but in this case I feel it’s justified as a balance against other shows, movies, and plays I’ve seen about this subject. It’s really nice to see a lighthearted approach to it.

Also worth noting is the comedic performances by all the actors involved. You can tell there’s a certain rawness to their performances, but again the earnestness of the actors makes the sometimes nerdy humor (two of the characters are LARPers, for example) come off really well.

If I have one complaint, it was that the venue is new and the acoustics weren’t quite worked out yet. The fridges off in the corner kept kicking in and interfering with the vocals of the performers. This seems to have been fixed in shows I’ve seen since then at this venue.