A Killing Game kills in Cincinatti fringe

dog & pony dc took their first road trip with A Killing Game earlier this month, and arrived back home able to use those magical words in its marketing, “award winning.”  At Cincy Fringe 2013, Killing Game was named the Dr. Robert J. Thierauf Producers’ Pick of the Fringe award and the League of Cincinnati Theatres named the devised play Best Use of Improvisation & Audience Participation.

Audience participation, indeed. In Killing Game, it’s the audience who decides who lives and who doesn’t. After seeing the 2012 performance at CHAW, Hunter Styles wrote about the audience experience: ” We begin as stone-faced spectators; we end like the world’s most talkative flash mob. A Killing Game is far more spontaneous, and infinitely more surprising, than most traditionally scripted shows you’ve seen lately. .. the payoff of A Killing Game ultimately pours from the shocked, eager energies of the audience members around you. The evening is handed over, in large part, to us. Miraculously, we don’t screw it all up.”

We went looking for a reaction from dog&pony dc and Killing Game director and co-writer Colin K. Bills replied:

“d&pdc entered the Cincy Fringe after hearing great things about it from performers at Capital Fringe Festival in 2012 who had performed in both festivals that summer. Unlike Cap Fringe, Cincy Fringe is curated, and features around 35 different shows the bulk of which feature out-of-town (and out-of-country) artists. The festival runs a continuous twelve days with performances every night of the week and during the afternoons as well on weekends.

“Overall this creates a more intimate atmosphere where we—even as newcomers to Cincinnati—got to know everybody involved with the festival. We were honored to receive the Producer’s Pick of the Fringe Award, which is determined by the Cincy Fringe Festival staff. So to receive that award, from all of these amazing people whom we had only just met… that was really terrific. We felt so welcomed by everybody in Cincy, particularly the folks at Know Theater, who host the festival and produce it with their theater space as the hub (so that theater is the corollary to Fort Fringe).

“While we have performed A Killing Game before, we made significant changes to the format and script, so this was a new show for us; something that had not been entirely proven. This was also the first time d&pdc has taken a show out on the road, and we were a little nervous that our approach to theater making wouldn’t translate outside of DC.

Fortunately, any misgivings we may have had were squelched entirely by Cincinnati audiences: they embraced the show with an incredible enthusiasm that gave us great momentum to bring the show back home. Having the Producer’s Pick award was just icing on an already delicious cake. We can only hope that the Cap Fringe audiences are just as enthusiastic as those in Cincy.”

Capital Fringe audiences will have 15 chances to take part in The Killing Game, which is being played in Woolly Mammoth’s rehearsal hall from July 11 – 28.