By Joseph McDonough
Enquirer contributor

The BlueForms Theatre Group's Fringe Festival entry, The Pursuit of Happiness, is a thought-provoking, high-energy exploration of the numbing evils of contemporary American life and culture.

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Using the ambitious mantra of "We Can Change the World," the young Columbus-based troupe delivers a 95-minute performance/lecture on what went wrong in the latter half of the 20th century, with a hint of the direction people need to go to transform the 21st into a better world for everyone.

While their targets are easy - consumerism, technology, corporate conglomerates, and the big baddie, television - their ideas are well examined and their passion infectious.

Director Matt Slaybaugh and the five-member cast (Tara DiLorenzo, Acacia Duncan, Liz Fitts, Brant W. Jones and Geoffrey Martin) mix a potpourri of theatrical elements and dramatized text to present their case.

These ingredients include music, choreography, humor, monologue confessions, letters describing work experience, history lessons (which could stand some pruning), literary quotations, pop culture references and poetic philosophizing.

Though still a bit shaky with some of their longer speeches on opening night Thursday, the actors worked hard at breathing life into a challenging performance piece, ultimately concluding that "art is not a mirror to reflect reality ... but a hammer to shape it."

Truly political theater is hard to find on American stages today.

The Pursuit of Happiness is exactly the kind of out-of-the-mainstream experimental work that Cincinnati's inaugural Fringe Festival promised and has now delivered.

The Pursuit of Happiness repeats at 4 p.m. today and 7 p.m. Friday at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival, 719 Race St., downtown.