This Scheherazade is on steroids and she is not telling tales, she is taking heads!

This world premier play is a direct descendent of the “Arabian Nights” but with a feminist and nearly misanthropic twist, until its eventual happy ending.  A sequel to the medieval Middle Eastern parable stories about the wily Scheherazade, the woman brought to the caliph’s palace to mate followed by swift execution, has been re-imagined and stood very much on its head and with tongue firmly wedged in cheek. [Read more...]

Picture yourself a 20-something secular humanist, liberal in politics and agnostic in religion. In other words, a  2010 Everyman, smug and complacant and oh so typical.

But now imagine that your penis has a mind of its own. Or as Woody Allen once pointed out, “when the blood rushes to your penis, it leaves your brains behind.”    [Read more...]

The artist Joseph Cornell (Ethan Slater) is sitting at a café table. A waitress (Kate Villa) enters and asks him what he wants to eat.

“What will I have?” The question seems to startle the young man. “I don’t know!”

“You’re not hungry?” she asks. He says nothing. “Well, then, I’ve got honey-colored seashells…” She rattles off a list of inedible objects.

“What will I do with these?” he asks, now visibly alarmed.

“Make a life,” she replies immediately. “Do you have a life?”

That’s when things begin to get strange. [Read more...]

“Sometimes it isn’t so good to go inside your head, Sylvia,” declares her mother Frances in this hands-down, must-see world-premiere drama by Any Grau Duvall.  It is the impressive work of a talented local playwright and it moved the Apothecary audience to tears as well as swift applause and genuine contemplation. [Read more...]

This is definitely an unusual play – at times hard to follow, quirky, and certainly original, so yes,  it’s a text-book example of Fringe at its best!   It proves challenging to draw in an audience, but it may still be worth your while to see it.

Cavers is 80 minutes long but actually seems longer – never a good thing to say about a play,  of course.

Still and all, there are good things to say about it also, starting with the fact that the content is so off-the-wall strange -speleologists(cavers) meetup with spelunkey monkeys!  And also with country-cranky yet cool Gertie Stoval (played and cracking wise by Raven Bonniwell), owner with her half-brother George Stoval (Tom Eisman, dour but dignified as a county commissioner who also”grows certrain illegal cash crops”) of a collapsing farmhouse sitting atop a wondrous cavern with a curative potential to make the American Dream come true!  How’s that for a catchy premise?

But wait, as they say on TV infomercials, there’s more!

The two speleologists are Charlie Tuggle (played with gawky charm by Vanita Kalra) and Dr. Polly Eidelweiss (Abri O’Connor), a lesbian on the prowl for winsome Charlie, as she comes on to her saying “you’re cute in a grad student sort of way.” They meet in turn Samantha Dean (Molly Coyle), who wants to use the magic cave to stage Godspell while the two academics debate how to harvest grants for medical research from it, and god-fearing Gertie, denying evolution with every breath,  meanwhile “thinks small,” having no idea what the stakes really are and simply wants to give tours there. Another scheme is to use the space to store radioactive waste products.

Possible uses of the cave are much discussed and most of the play is set underground in a darkened place filled with cave monkeys (why – of course!),spurring much talk of evolutionary theory (who really is descended from whom, Mr. Darwin?). Playwright Mark Rigney, now a stay-at-home-dad with two young sons, and a novelist and short-story writer in Evansville Indiana, seems to know his scientific stuff.

Messy property rights are also at issue in Cavers.  Who has the right to exploit the wondrous properties of this magical cavern? Like Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon,” the cavern is something that dreams are made of, but whose dream shall prevail?

Basically, stay away from this one unless you don’t mind the longeurs of being bored by long stretches of pointless dialogue and digressive mystifications.  But if you’re fascinated with caves, then this rates at best a definite maybe.

Cavers

Produced by Nu Sass Productions
Reviewed by David Hoffman

Running time:  80 minutes

Read all the reviews and check out the full Capital Fringe schedule here.

Did you see the show?  What did you think?

Which would YOU choose?  A lifelong ride in an electric wheelchair, paralyzed from the neck down?  Or a one-way ticket to oblivion, – call that, to round off the metaphor, a seat in the electric chair where YOU can pull the switch? [Read more...]