Fringe - saving the best for last

Sunday was definitely the best day, overall, with the gorgeous weather, dinner at Loring Grill, and two really excellent shows. Missed the boat on minnehaha's brunch expedition, so we went to LG for dinner instead. Significantly more expensive than lunch, but worth it. Both Bob and Chris were there, which was a plus. The dinner rush was over, so Bob joined us at our outside table for some catching up and gossip. It was delightful to see him. He sounded like he was missing the old Minnstf crowd and would like to be invited to a Minnstf meeting sometime soon. I got his email address if anyone wants it.

Adventures in Mating - absolutely the funniest thing I've seen at the Fringe this year. Richard thought it tied with THACO for that title, which says a lot considering how totally THACO's Target Audience he is. I almost skipped this one, due to an unfortunate experience with an "interactive play" at BNW years ago (I think it was called "Flanagan's Wake," and it was dreadful, combining all the worst aspects of ethnic stereotypes played for laughs and lazy improv). This was something else entirely. The sharp writing and dead-on comic timing would have been quite enough on their own to make this a winner. But the audience participation element was handled so skillfully that it made the show even better. Considering that the format meant that they had to have rehearsed as least twice as much material as we actually saw on the stage, the quality was astounding.

Charley Bethel's Gilgamesh - wow. One of our best local story-tellers tackles the oldest recorded story, with spectacular results. Other than the song in Silverlock, I really didn't know much about The Epic of Gilgamesh except that it was written in cuneiform on clay tablets thousands of years ago. It's really quite a tale. I may write a little more about it later.

More about Gilgamesh

The story of Gilgamesh dates back at least 4500 years, to ancient Sumeria. Yet, it is strangely familiar. Superhero and loyal sidekick fight monsters, save civilization. Hero is tempted by dangerous vixen with a disturbing history of dead boyfriends, turns her down, then has to deal with the wrath of a woman scorned. Hero loses beloved friend and journeys into the land of death in a vain attempt to rescue him. Along the way he walks for days in the dark under a huge mountain. He rides with the boatman that ferries the dead across the water. He even stops for a beer at the Restaurant at the Edge of the World.

And he listens to a long story-within-a-story about how this guy survived a great flood by building an ark (instructions divinely provided), determines that the waters are dropping by sending out birds to look for land, and ultimately receives insurance against future deluges in the form of - you'll never guess - a rainbow! And that's not the only story that gets lifted and dropped into a much later best-seller, the Old Testament. Enkidu is a man created out of clay by a god. He lives wild and innocent with the animals until he is seduced into an act that awakens his mind and turns him from an animal into a self-aware human being, after which he has a moral sense and can no longer commune with the beasts. Sound familiar? Well, it did to me.

Other literary homages that occurred to me as the story unfolded: the Red Bull of King Haggard in "The Last Unicorn" seems like a direct reference to the Great Bull of Heaven. And the sorceror Lugulbanda from the sci-fi theatrical trilogy "Warp"? Lugulbanda was the name of Gilgamesh's father. Surely Tolkien's Paths of the Dead owes its inspiration to Gilgamesh's dark journey under the mountain. I'm not sure if The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is a direct reference or just one of those ideas that people keep thinking up on their own. Really, though, what an odd place to put a restaurant! You wouldn't think you'd get much walk-by traffic.

Anyway, Richard and I had a lot of fun reviewing the story as we ate dinner and trying to figure out how Silverlock's verses about Tammuz fit in. I checked it out on the Internet when we got home, and discovered that Charley's version was quite faithful to the original. (Tammuz didn't have any direct connection with Gilgamesh's story, but he was one of the unfortunate former boyfriends of Ishtar, the vamp that tries to seduce Gil).