Threat of Violence Erupts at Fringe Festival

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                                  Here’s a heads-up about how violence hath reared its ugly head in shows at the currently-running NY International Fringe Festival with, head and shoulders above the others, the drama Sammy Gets Mugged exploring it seriously and psychologically with originality. There’s music with the other two: A man who hires a hit man to kill his own wife is only one part of the plot, such as it is, for a musical called Hush. And, speaking of marital disharmony inviting violence, there’s plenty of that and more hostility  in Killing Nellie, between choruses of songs by a singing married folk duo.  All three plays have their writers in the cast.    I can think of far better ways of killing time than spending it with the latter two joy-killers whose virtues mostly escaped me, and I awaited escape.  Each was, at times, an attack on audience’s senses and sensibilities.   But let’s start with the relatively good news: a guy got mugged. 

Sammy Gets Mugged is the title and OK, now you know the plot.  I can also tell you that this incident’s after-effects are the other focus of the play.  And when I tell you that it’s based on an actual mugging and the man who got mugged is also the writer and he plays himself, you could understandably think you should run for the hills, lest you be victimized by a victim using a play and an audience to rail about his horrible experience, seeking sympathy, catharsis, and somewhere to direct his rage and re-hashed fear.  There is fear here to face, and it’s in your face almost as much as in his face, but have no fear that it’s all self-indulgent theater as therapy.  Yes, it’s visceral.  Yes, the playwright playing himself, re-playing the incident on stage and in his mind (here, often the same thing) tells us that he has a need to examine and remember it accurately.  Forgetting it would be nice, but that really isn’t possible, is it?  Perhaps his natural writer’s curiosity and story-loving (he’s also a movie critic) leads him to want to know more about the mugger and his motivations and understand emotions of both of them.  The brief encounter included a moment when the mugger seemed to panic and cry, and they have their interaction at the cash machine.  What makes this theater piece so captivating is that it takes full advantage of the elements that are uniquely of the theatre.  Rather than just have the story told and analyzed in babbling, blubbering monologue, writer-actor Dan Heching, naming himself Sammy for the play, steps in and out of memory.  He comfortably switches from intimate sharer of fears to social commentator to take-charge man pulling the strings, ordering the mugger to appear, answer questions, sit, face him, and face his own feelings.  As helpless, powerless and scared as he is during/right after the mugging, he is fully in control --- commanding that memories be organized, feelings be analyzed, and the big bruiser of a mugger bow to his will, scowling and grousing as he complies.  Time can freeze or action be rewound, as can fantasies, like using a TV remote control device.  This is theatre!  Dan Heching is a humble Everyman, fragile but feisty, determined to face the haunting, harrowing incident that lasted just minutes but had long-lasting effects.  As an actor, he occasionally needs the note to speak more clearly in the beginning, but holds the stage.  As the mugger, Patrick Byas can turn on a dime each time he makes quick changes in stance and energy, going from overwhelmingly threatening to being a big baby whining about having to take orders, to hijacking the audience’s sympathies by revealing his own burdens.  Then, he’ll pull a fast one and pull the rug out by saying maybe he’s lying.  The passerby who sees them at the cash machine is barely remembered by Sammy, and when he tries to conjure her up in memory, she (Stephanie Pope Caffey, in a marvelously intriguing portrayal) complains about his memory’s stereotyped characterization of her: “Look what I’ve got to work with,” she gripes.  If it sounds like there’s some humor here, and a touch of theater of the absurd, you’re correct.  Comic relief is used deliciously here, and just enough.  Director Noah Himmelstein does remarkable and thoughtful work on this tightrope walk, balancing the moods and elements, avoiding over-indulgence in pity (for either of the men), pontificating, navel-gazing, or easy answers.  A tricky interplay of tension and release, the balance of actual memory and what-if, it’s all quite the triumph.  The audience is engaged and challenged, rather than made to be just witness and commiserating companions, knowing that some of us as city dwellers have probably been victims of similar assaults.  The play also touches on larger themes, such as our human nature’s need to deconstruct, reconstruct and try to “make sense” of everything that happens to us, even those things we typically label “senseless crimes.” 

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Hush: The Musical:  The characters are stuck at an airport where flights are grounded due to snow conditions.  Mismatched characters with nothing in common, who’d never seek each other out in normal circumstances, being thrown together in cramped quarters for an extended period is a favorite theatrical device.  We watch to see what happens and how they might learn from each other.  Or not.  But "Gilligan’s Island," Lifeboat and Sartre’s No Exit were more fun.  Boredom, frustration, annoyance, and claustrophobia set in.  It’s also true for the characters here, but, sadly, I was speaking of the audience, or at least for myself and others I observed, including my companion and a couple of people we knew.  Others in the large audience at Le Poisson Rouge may have found more distraction in the action and the songs.  It has won an award and been previously produced in the city and many tickets were sold.  Having an onstage violinist and cellist makes the music seem richer and fuller, making Hush lush.  It may seem grand and important at first.  However, at times the emperor has no clothes, for, under these lovely layers and brocade, the melodies themselves can be blunt, the material stretched thin and tending to repeat promisingly attractive clusters of notes, not making a full cloth to drape the even thinner lyrical ideas.  Charles Mandracchia is the composer.  And the director.  And the producer.  And the co-conceiver.  But not the wordsmith.  She’s in the cast.  Stay tuned.  The long two-act musical called Hush is based on a one-act Italian comedy called Shhhhh. 

Several youngish waiting passengers have small roles with little characterization or characteristics beyond petulant impatience, and little to no plot-thickening assignments; their character names are the same as the actors’ real first names, which is probably more of a hint to us of this than a bizarre coincidence.   Perhaps the stranded passengers need something to do, so it shouldn’t be strange then, should it, that they echo the last couple of words of a soloist’s song which is a private phone call: “’I’ll call you as soon as I can (I can)/ There’s been a delay in our plan (Our plan).”  The questionable plan in question is the murder of the guy’s wife and he’s talking to his hit man with the heavy accent and an eye patch.  We’re asked to believe that’s he’s really a nice, cuddly teddy bear of a guy who just needs a job and, well, it’s difficult if you don’t have a work visa.  OK, I guess that is supposed to justify committing murder… or is the wife’s unfaithfulness that justifies it?  Or make it all a laugh riot? Are the various conversations about the plot to murder enough of a plot to pull us in?  Are we meant to want this guy to change his mind and be a good guy and caring husband?  Or do hope the hit man will reform?  Or is there supposed to be suspense?  Are we rooting for his wife who we don’t get to know but are obligated to feel bad for because her hours may be numbered?  Are these the characters we should be caring about?  Or is it the odd jewelry-laden gypsy type lady in bright orange who cries “Hush” and chants “Om” for meditation, on a Buddhist butting-in mission to mellow out everyone for no reason any more apparent than any reason for her presence at all?  The airline employee trying to keep things calm in her own, more traditional, airline-employee-smiley way tries to eject her.  The sung conversation takes on lyrics that can most charitably described as “plain and simple” as they sing back and forth: “Listen to what I say now/Please go away now/I’m really busy, so please go.”  No such luck. Hopefully for the husband, with possible regrets for us, he has unlimited minutes on his cell phone as we not only hear his numerous conversations with the hit man and his wife and, through the magic of theatre, we can see them sing back.  “Every time you talk, you make me sick,” goes one telephone conversation lyric, followed, fortunately, “I cannot go on arguing with you.”  While some such lyrics musicalize poetry-challenged everyday speech not crying out to put on wings of music and ends up as earthbound as the airplane in the story, later we get the loftier but too familiar and vague mottos worthy of a greeting card and recalling Disney-fied dreams of inspiring goals, “Anything is possible/Deep inside your heart/Everyone wants something/Make a wish and it comes true/Look inside your heart/You will find that something.”  Sweet, but out of left field for the clunky and insensitive characters we’ve met.  In between, the lyricist seems out to break the world’s record for sloppy false rhymes in a musical, a pet peeve of mine (see below, too, in the next musical).  Here, we get such non-rhymes as town/around; see me/freed me; wake up/shape up; stars/heart; queen/Caribbean; plan/hand and the frequent offender, home/alone.  By the way, that actress orange-clad lady hawking the virtues of meditation and seeming uncomfortably out of place on stage putting words in her own and others’ mouths, as she is the librettist, Emelise Aleandri.  Attention, theater passengers:  Now boring at the Fringe Festiv---  I mean now boarding at the Fringe Festival: Hush. Security precautions X-ray its contents and find it carrying on, but its carry-on luggage is pretty lightweight, yet heavy-handed.  Fasten your seat belts for a long ride. 

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Killing Nellie becomes increasingly violent and disturbing after a low-key beginning and a sense of quirkiness for a while.  But for what payoff or point for this import from Australia, besides making the audience uncomfortable or annoyed?  If something were to come out of it, if we were to switch gears, or be pulled in to care, maybe, just maybe, there’d be some light to shed on the darkness.  We’re supposedly at a concert appearance by a not-so-dynamic duo is called Killin Nellie: That’s Killin, not Killing, as in the show’s title, but stay tuned for the gun shot. Mark Storen and Oda Aunan play husband and wife performers, and are also the writer/directors of the story of this very odd couple.  She’s a little bit country, he’s a little bit rock and roll.  She speaks Norwegian and smiles a lot and is pretty.  He frowns a lot and is pretty angry, sometimes passing on the “passive” part of passive-aggressive.  They are the only characters in the play, presented as a “unique concert event where the love has definitely left the building” as it is described in the notes.  As it begins, he appears, guitar in hand, but she’s late.  She’s late for a very important date, giving the more embarrassed-and-peeved-than-worried husband our first known reason for being angry with her and a hint that he can’t go on alone: “She has the song list and most of the ability.” In she rushes, taking her place on stage, blithely. As they sing their chipper tunes, he glares and mutters, forcing her to one side of the stage.  One has hopes for  bit that the bland, cardboard-deep songs and tensions and oddball but smiley, casual personalities will result in the kind of parody recalling Christopher Guest’s movie about folkies in harmony only when singing, A Mighty Wind.  A darker comedy with more flair and compelling creepy factor or a husband-wife psychological taunting with a whiff of Edward Albee’s classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? might be other ways to go.  Instead, it’s another introduction to another simplistic song and the squabbling that eventually becomes physical and increasingly brutal, he against she, and he has a gun, and…. 

But the show must go on, against all logic, bruised and battered, maybe blood-splattered, with the “ironic” counterpoint of the sweet little ditties.  And what of those ditties?  Most are in English, or shall we say English with decidedly limited vocabulary.  Besides the lame false rhymes like home/phone; lamb/hand; bowl/old; lover/brother; ground/town; dark/darts, there are songs that perhaps are meant to be so “bad” that they are “good fun.”  For example, with another false rhyme, we get this chorus: “Like goldfish in a bowl/Your thoughts are getting old/ Swim, swim, swim, swim,/Swim, goldfish, swim. “ Add the word “swim” another dozen times or so, and you’ve got the song.  Another number repeats the line “That’s what happens when the train goes wrong” as the only words in its chorus, and stays on track, so to speak, repeating the line 18 times, sometimes leaving off the last word.  Kinda catchy, though.  A couple of female solos are presented as being authentic Norwegian folk tunes.  Very peppy, they!   Sung with big smiles, it’s like a pep rally interlude at lunch break at a spousal abuse weekend workshop.  What’s frustrating and also the silver lining, should you find yourself under this storm cloud, is that their singing voices are actually quite pleasing.  But the hostility alternating with goofball tunes is more like an idea for a sketch that runs out of steam than an almost-full hour’s concert/play where you want to call a truce or call three vehicles before long: an ambulance for her, a police car for him, and maybe call a cab for yourself after 20 minutes.  That’s what happens when the train goes wrong.  Or is it pain?     

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For schedules, ticket info, and all the scoop on the dozens and dozens and dozens of shows in the New York International Fringe Festival, see www.fringenyc.org and note that you’ll pay just $15 instead of the already low-ish price of $18 if you buy in advance.  All shows are around Fourth Street or further downtown.