Fringe Thursday - Day 8

[dreamshark]

 
Spin          * * * *
presented by Outspoke Productions
Venue: Ritz Proscenium

A real treat. Unusual mixture of spoken word, song, slide show and percussion bicycle.  The content is great too - a mixture of fascinating historical tidbits, speculation, personal experience and musical experimentation. Annie Londonderry is my new hero!  I can't believe I never heard of her before!  The show loses its focus a bit during the last 15 minutes, detouring into an over-long song decrying mass consumerism *yawn* and never quite finding its way back to its bicycle core. But it's still a very solid 4 kitties.


Missing: the fantastical and true story of my father's disappearance and what I found when I looked for him       * * *
presented by Jessica Ferris
Venue: Intermedia Arts

Starts out strong with some inventive physical theater and creative use of simple props to convey emotion. Kudos to Jessica Ferris for having the guts (and the flexibility) to wriggle her very substantial body through that tiny hole with all of us watching her long struggle. It was a curiously effective portrayal of her inner child's desperation and compulsion to keep searching for her missing father. And wonderful job turning that metal box into a full-fledged character in the play. Things get a little hard to follow after that. Jessica rotates through the roles of a few too many relatives to keep track of as she interviews them one after another in her quest to figure out who her father really was (is) and if he is still alive. Eventually she straightens out some of the confusion by making a pictorial family tree for us and naming them all, but I still had some difficulty figuring out when she was speaking as her mother and when as Grandma Sally, and some of the stories just seemed irrelevant (what was that business with Grandma Nina and the bed linens?).  As Jessica's search continues it becomes more obvious just how permanently wounded she and her whole family have been by two generations of compulsive liars in their midst.  Ultimately it's all just a very sad story with no resolution. I hope this poor young woman eventually comes to terms with just what she can and can't control about her family and moves on.