We’ve barely said farewell
to the New York Musical Theater Festival when who should come strolling in but
the New York International Fringe Festival, with its barrage of 185 shows in 16
days in over 20 different venues and time slots.
I don’t know how many of
these I’ll be getting to, but let me begin with the first one I saw. It’s called Clown Play, whose playwright Paul
David Young made something of a name for himself at the 2011 Fringe with In The
Summer Pavilion, a play that imagines different possible futures for three
friends. That play
went on to an Off Broadway run at 59East59 and has since been turned into a
film, set to be released in the coming year.
Whether Clown Play will
follow that route remains to be seen, but what is clear is that Mr. Young is a
talented wordsmith who is able to take seemingly disparate elements and
coalesce them into a logical and unexpectedly sweet play (unexpected, since a
semi-automatic weapon puts in a threatening appearance from time to time).
As Clown Play opens, we are
face-to-face with a woman (the highly talented Carol Lee Sirugo) who waxes
philosophic. “All is silence,” she begins, before going off on a Beckett-like
ramble on matters of great significance, not unlike Lucky’s speech in Waiting
for Godot.
Is she insane, we wonder, or
a lost soul of some sort, trapped if not in Beckett Land, then maybe in
Sartre Town or Kafka Village?
We will get answers, but not
right away. Instead, the scene shifts to a man and a woman, Tommy (Joel Reuben
Ganz) and Nancy (Emily James), who are floundering around in the dark, much
frightened and feeling at risk of personal harm from someone or something in
the unknown.
Again, the feeling of dread
pervades. What kind of place is
this? Could these characters be dead
souls drifting around in Purgatory?
And finally, we are
introduced to yet another couple, Barry (Ryan Barry, a Summer Pavilion alum)
and Elisa (Marissa Molnar), who have set up housekeeping in an apparently
abandoned home. Now things start to feel
less like a ghost story and more like an all-too-real post-apocalyptic world, something,
perhaps, like the one in Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders.
Teasingly, the play rotates
among these characters in short scenes that we must take in before everything
begins to make sense. One of the better ones is a perverse version of the
ubiquitous Christmas letter (in this case, a video), a litany of life horrors
recited by Ms. Sirugo’s character.
Just when we are questioning
whether all this is leading anywhere beyond the suggestive and atmospheric, the
characters start to interact with one another—at first with a not-surprising
degree of suspicion (hence the semi-automatic weapon), but gradually warming
until they loosen up and begin to meld into a cohort resembling the Tribe from
Hair, a self-made family against all expectations.
And to what do they owe this
dramatic change? Why, consider the title
as you leave the theater having had a surprisingly good time.
And while it is Mr. Young’s
writing skill that was able to turn seemingly random scenes into a real charmer
of a play, much credit must go to the cast (all of whom have impressive theater
credentials, by the way), and to director Robert Lutfy.
Clown Play is a little
oddball, no doubt, but the production at the COW (Celebration of Whimsy)
Theater on Clinton Street in the Lower East Side is well worth putting on your
Fringe list. If that part of the city
not your usual theatrical habitat, consider that it is just off Houston Street
and only a couple of blocks from Katz’s Delicatessen. I recommend picking up a pastrami Reuben
after the show, and pondering the magic of theater while you are eating
it.
Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to
share your own theater stories by posting a comment.
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