Edinburgh’s example has hit Chicago. Now in midpassage, the Chicago Fringe Festival, an awesome 170 performances in 11 days, is stirring up some powerful make-believe on the mainstage and upstairs venues at Organic Theater, as well as a weekend outdoor cabaret on Buckingham Place.
A sampling of five Saturday night shows (out of 28) suggests that this first-time venture has earned a rep for exciting, if eclectic, entertainment, a bold mix of indoor street theater, improv scene-shaping, and reckless experimentation from Europe, the U.S. and all over Chicago.
Certainly you won’t confuse Mills Productions’ three-theater circus with anything in town, past or present.
Like refugees from cable TV’s “Absolutely Fabulous,” the irreverent women in black smocks who make up London’s Sensible Footwear have attitude to spare and spare none in “Close to the Bone.”
An uncensored stream of sexual satire, this cheeky 70-minute comedy combines wicked ballads, sung a capella in doo-wop style, and steely sketches that skewer or celebrate housework, sex games, bikini waxing, safe sex, living alone, social diseases and Camille Paglia-in short, all the ways people manage to shrink themselves before (and after) sex.
Speaking what all have thought but few expect to hear out loud, Sensible Footwear revels in the British game of “cocking a snoot” at pomposity.
More subdued but just as uncompromising, “Joyride,” presented by Toronto’s McManic Productions, employs a kind of standup storytelling to depict the ironically named Joy, a woman desperate for “validation.” Laura McGhee plays her with lacerating self-exposure, warbling hysteria and a devastating deadpan.
Backed by Frank McAnulty’s deft impersonations of fatuous nuns and other authority figures, McGhee’s game survivor experiments with religion, stripping, marriage, lesbianism, and, finally, happiness. The generically upbeat ending may feel pat, but everything else seems more eager to share than to please.
Traditionally naturalistic, Gregory Lyle-Newton’s “66 Intimacies,” from Seattle’s Blackvaliant Productions, is an intense portrait of a trapped young couple in a pivotal year, 1966. Vaguely sensing the seminal changes around them, the couple (Lyle-Newton and Carolyn Polonsky) embark on an auto trip that’s also a time trip. As they reflect or reject their time’s random violence (Richard Speck, the sniper killings in Austin, Vietnam), the scared lovers expose their well-founded fears of their families and future.
Shaun Vinyard’s leisurely and surefooted staging is marred by the actors’ sporadic mumbling. Are the car windows supposed to be up?
Reflecting the Festival’s summer-fair and street-theater inspiration, “The Magician” is an impressive tour de force from Texas illusionist Magical Mystical Michael. Explaining that “I don’t want your pity; I’ll earn it,” the deft trickster proceeds to levitate an audience member, transport a chosen card to the middle of an orange, dematerialize handkerchiefs, manipulate another audience member into picking out of a bowl the one correct key in five and other marvels too amazing to want explaining. (The run is over but perhaps Magical Mystical Michael will return for Fringe II.)
The local talent was thespian Fredric Stone, reprising “Will and Testament,” his warm homage to Shakespeare. Stone enacts an actor’s fondest dream-to reach heaven and audition for the Bard. Happily, the Bard is as pleased as Stone’s audience.
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Chicago Fringe Festival runs through Sunday at Organic Theater, 3319 N. Clark St. Phone 312-327-5588.
