Archives for July 2011

A murder, an execution, a conspiracy and a history of rumored abuse stand at the center of Belle Parricide.  Based on the historical tale of a young Italian noblewoman named Beatrice Cenci who was executed for the murder of her father in 1599, the work shows how one event can capture people’s imagination for centuries.

Every junky knows that the first thing that happens when you stick a needle into your arm—before any narcotic reaches your veins—you give up a drop of blood.  It floats in the syringe like a little red balloon. It may not seem like much, but after a few hundred or thousand injections, they add up.  […]

Have you ever met a human manifestation of the ozone layer before? I hadn’t either, but upon viewing Terry McKinstry’s 70 Million Tons, my answer to that question will never be the same. And it’s for the better. We spend plenty of time personifying the planet (Earth Day, Mother Earth, etc.), but to give a […]

Ellouise Schoettler is an enthusiast of genealogy. My Diamond Jubilee is her first public performance telling her autobiographical story of Finding Gus. Based on how the performance is staged, it is easy to imagine that before she only told the story in the comfort of her home.

In addition to providing the space and freedom for wild and crazy stuff, The Capitol Fringe Festival offers a tremendously important opportunity for plays in development to be staged and get some feedback. Night Sky is such a play. The playwright, Pat Connelly, has been working on Night Sky for several years, rewritten it numerous […]

The experience of being an audience member can be kind of alienating, caught behind the fourth wall. But every once in awhile along comes a performance that can truly feel intimate, in which a person communicates their ideas to the audience with breathtaking efficacy.

Manifesto! is a joyous flight into the world of physical theater. Entire schools of thought are turned on their head and spun into zany interpretations with heart-pumping theatrics. Every word, noise and movement is finely tuned to leave you in hysterics. Characters fly through the air in slow motion sequences. The art movement, Dadaism, is […]

A blank stage and a few boxes are all that is needed to tell a magical tale of Sisters of Ellery Hollow.  The audience is welcomed to the mysterious Ellery Hollow by sisters Abby (Melissa Marie Hmelnicky) and Elsie (Rachel Holt) who proceed to talk about their strange lives. As they point out, they are well […]

John Hefner takes his audience on a coast-to-coast highway adventure bound for … well, nowhere in his one-man performance of  The Road to Nowhere.

Make no mistake about it. Writers rarely perform their personal confessions. Stories of real-life struggles are often told in memoirs, where wrenching personal details can be observed from a safe distance.

For a crash course on what to expect from Fringe, you can’t do better than banished? productions’ mad avant-garde experience, Tactile Dinner Car. It’s a crazy sociological experiment playing by its own rules, smack dab in the middle of the Baldacchino Gypsy Tent.

Though there’s definitely an element of raunchy radicalism about Fringe, it’s important to remember that there are performances suitable for all. If you have a small child in your life, a sweet outing for you and them would be Wit’s End Puppets presentation of The Malachite Palace. Combining both shadow puppetry and marionettes, this adaptation of […]