goestoshow

[Once again, to get it out of the way, I got a comped into this play.]

All I really knew about this play going in was that Morgan Smith (previously reviewed here for her work Electra in the 2009 New Works festival) co-wrote and performed in it, and that it involved somehow a school mascot named Wally the Woodchuck who’s been saying creepy things on twitter all week.

So I expected anger, and I expected creepy, and I got both in spades. Mixed in there was a really nice story about teenagers dealing (mostly badly, but eventually somewhat successfully) with the ways they’re Different from their peers. In fact, the only character who actually comes across as relatively normal is the main protagonist, Wallace (David Johnston), who took on being the mascot at least partly because everyone was always calling him Wally the Woodchuck anyways.

His erstwhile girlfriend, Lydia (Elena Porter), seems more interested in his costume than in him. His best friend, Gina (Morgan Smith), is angry and bitter at everything in her life and seems in turns a bit interested in every single other character in the play. His and Gina’s tormentor, Vince (Brian Bergum), is deeply unhappy with his life as a popular football player because he wants to be good at other things but people keep insisting it’s the only thing he can do (something I can empathize with).

For the first half of the play, Morgan completely steals the show every time she’s on stage. Her personality is a whirlwind that completely overwhelms everyone else. But by the second half, as the other characters start revealing their quirks, it becomes more of an ensemble work and it really comes together. Some of the quirkier personality traits are played mostly for laughs in an as-if kind of way earlier in the play, and you could just hear the jaws drop in the house as they eventually proved to mostly be real things.

I definitely recommend seeing this play. It’s really really fun. If only for the hilarious choreographed fight scene between Wallace and Wally the Woodchuck in the middle of the play.

I just hope no one gets heat stroke from wearing that costume when King Edward School gets sweltering hot for the later shows when the weather gets better.

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.