By Jackie Demaline
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The first Cincinnati Fringe Festival opened Wednesday night on a trio of downtown Cincinnati stages. The opening night shows I saw mostly had romance on their minds:
It Pours Out: The Lake Years by Art & Drama Club is about adolescent romantic angst and a big, dead frog;
See Kate Run by Women's Explosive Theatre Company is about twentysomething romantic angst;
I Will Love You at 8 p.m. Next Wednesday from Know Theatre Tribe is about homosexual romantic angst.
The wonderful thing about the entire opening night was a palpable energy. While audiences numbered in the dozens rather than in the scores (not bad for a midweek kick-off of a completely unknown new project), there was an electric awareness that everyone was in a room together sharing something completely new, the birth of which would be worth remembering.
But I won't fudge the truth. All of these shows, which will continue in repertory over the next 10 days, are mundane in thought and in execution.
The idea of Fringe is to force one's way in from the outside, but all these shows fall in the dead center of the mainstream and none of them have performances that can bolster indifferent to downright awful new scripts.
It's peculiar how everybody seems to think they can write a play. Just how wrong they are is demonstrated by A Poster of the Cosmos, a seemingly slight one-act by the great Lanford Wilson which is a small but shattering AIDS elegy.
The second half of a one-act double bill with I Will Love You..., Cosmos is staggering in its honesty and beauty of language, Jim Stump gives a performance to match the script as a lump of a blue collar guy who isn't afraid of his feelings, which pour out during what is clearly a police interrogation.
Stump gets terrific direction from Ed Cohen and he and Cosmos are likely to stand as one of the best performances of the two-week festival. But Cosmos should be the standard, not the pinnacle.
It Pours Out, which, at 35 minutes, qualifies as a curtain raiser has an undeniable goofy charm and potent energy, which can be credited to director Nathan Gabriel, but it's almost too long for its subject.
Despite a cameo by a lake goddess, this is essentially a shaggy frog story about a blue jean-clad, 17 year-old suburban Cinderella who can't decide between two boys (one of them a would-be anarchist, the other one dead, hmmm) and takes just about half an hour to figure out heck, she's only 17, she doesn't have to.
See Kate Run is a wallflower cousin to Sex in the City with a twentysomething, intensely boring and self-involved young woman unwilling to own up to the guy who loves her that she's not ready for marriage and in the meantime takes up with her old stud muffin.
Of course she has a wiseacre best friend and many changes of outfits. What separates Kate from Sex is a lousy script, flaccid characters and acting that never rises above acceptable. It's worth mentioning that most of the cast are Ohio State University theater majors, and there's no better demonstration of how truly exceptional our College-Conservatory of Music is at University of Cincinnati.
I Will Love You... is a by-the-book love affair that moves backward in time between a married guy who's a closeted gay and a guy who stays close to the closet so he won't be bounced from his job.
It's local playwright Kevin Barry's first script, from a decade ago, and there's no mistaking its derivative material or plastic characters as anything other than a new writer feeling his way.
I haven't mentioned names of actors because what's the point?
Fringe producer Jason Bruffy proudly states that Fringe entries are not curated, but next year he might want to think about starting strong - and re-visiting the definition of "original" material to mean more than "new," but that which is novel, inventive and new in concept or execution.
