#cincyfringe

An irreverent and tongue in cheek look at a 90 year old rodent that is more famous than Santa Claus

By Ricky and Dana Young-Howze

Cincinnati Fringe

We are hardcore Disney Fans (they're our favorite evil corporation). But if you can't look at them with a critical eye you probably shouldn't be here. All that said if you are one of our fellow hardcore fans of the World's Most Famous Theme Park Rodent...well buckle up!!!

One thing I have to say about this show by Rory Sheridan with additional acting by Mia Vera with music composed by James Allen is that it is very visually interesting. I mean I could go into the graphics and the animations and the throwbacks to certain styles all day. For that alone it's well worth a watch. But you should also watch it because it's also one of a kind. No one else is doing anything remotely like this creative venture that does it's best to skirt around copyright infringement. It's also like if every beloved children's character had its own version of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This was a weird amalgamation between a one man show, an indie film, and a canister of futuristic nightmare fuel that fell off the time machine and got spilled over the tristate area (no seriously that half dog half man kept us up at night) but in an irreverently good way. Dana remarked that she had never seen a one person show/movie before. I was absolutely certain that the German expressionists would have tried it at least once. His genre callbacks from the beginning through the end are just jarring enough to make them cool.

Our biggest issue is that this play has no handhold for us to hold onto during the play. I mean the main character is dying and we don't care. I was actually more interested in the futuristic AI than anything else. Dana was more emotionally attached to the mouse. So if Sheridan really didn't care that we were okay with his character’s corpse then yay!!! If he does care well...sorry?

I don't know exactly how Sheridan wanted us to feel about the Mouse’s journey. Are we supposed to be an audience who doesn't know how the Theme Park Rodent started? Does he want hardcore fans to feel happy or laugh at the whole thing? I mean the references definitely aren't subtle and I don't think that they were meant to be. I mean I started groaning at first every time a reference came through. I didn't know if this was a bunch of Easter Eggs that only Annual Pass holders would understand or if he made them so easy even the most casual ear hat wearer would understand. Dana is such a die hard fan that she knew Sheridan got the Duck’s military career wrong (he was in the army btw) and I don't know why he didn't talk about his college mascot career in Oregon. That's the kind of fans we are. So I guess Sheridan knew that he wasn't going to be able to please every fan and I almost certain he was okay with ticking off a few. I'm also interested in a way that he turned me into a Nazi punching thawed superhero meme going “I understood that reference” through most of the show. I'm also glad he was a lawyer so he knew exactly what to do to keep the Princess Castle Theme Park Company Hitmen from finding him in his sleep. Or suing him...whichever came first.

So all in all this was a play that made me think, cringe, think again, and start shopping for the costume that the AI was wearing. So there you go. Well now's the time to say goodbye. But please if you do see a half dog half man running around please call the ASPCA.

Dana and I have had a lot of conversations about what we want to say about all the craziness going on. Of course as a business run by two queer writers and one POC we absolutely and unambiguously denounce racism in all it's shapes sizes and forms. We stand with those who are protesting. We mourn the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others at the hands of the police. Together we stand with you to fight for a brighter tomorrow because Black Lives Matter.

We are saddened that we couldn't join any protests this week. Dana is immunocompromised and we both have limited mobility. Being there physically right now was not an option for us. So as the protests raged on we started looking for ways that we could use the platform we have to amplify and raise up Black voices and art. And we're also making a commitment to you now about our policies moving forward:

To theatre companies,

What follows is a promise in three parts: This is not a threat or an act of posturing. A) We promise that: we will cease reviewing any theatre, artist, venue, or show that has been proven to be racist in casting, policies, words, or behaviors. If we can independently verify that this behavior has happened whether onstage, backstage, or in the community we will never darken your doors again.

B) We promise that when we have discovered racism that can be independently verified by us we will name and shame you on our blog and, if necessary, will share all information we have with the media and appropriate authorities.

C) We will continue to strive to see Black theatre artists and teachers AND students in all levels of a theatre company’s ranks. It is no good to see a theatre company open its doors to Black artists in auditions but have no room in the administration for them.

This promise also applies to acts of sexism, ableism, homophobia, sexual assault, or any other form of bigotry. We are striving for an inclusive world and one that strives to make lasting change that doesn't need protests to get white people to pay attention. We will continue to amplify, raise up, and promote Black voices in hopes for a day when we don't need to anymore because the new world will already love and celebrate diversity as much as we do. Don't let this be a fleeting moment. Enact real and lasting change.

Signed,

Don’t let Emily Borst or @cincyfringe know but we're are suckers for Queer romance.

By RnD

Cincinnati Fringe

Review 266

Because we have been teaching workshops all over the world, I have been working on a way to talk about writing shows that don't rely on quoting dead white guys. I’ve started talking about writing plays like cooking and that there are a million different recipes to make a story. There is no other show like “They End Up Together” by Emily Borst at Cincy Fringe to illustrate that concept. This show shows us how a play can embrace a sappy romance formula and still make it their own.

I have to say there is an intensely satisfying feeling to have a show that lives up to the title. There’s no questioning, there’s no “will they or won’t they” we’re just looking at a great love story blossoming. That’s not to say that there aren’t some kinks to the plan. I would walk the hell out if I found out my ex was related to my crush. However, that's one of the most brilliant things about this story. Even if there’s no doubt about what’s going to happen there can still be complications.

With this show I love that they locked the camera down and let the story happen. Dana sometimes loves when a director gets behind the camera and gets a good shot vocabulary with the audience. The words of this play take center stage however, and our characters need room to breathe. Borst is a great chef and crafts dialogue like a piece of fine dessert. That's where the real interest comes from for me.

There used to be a time when many of the dead white guys that we consider the canon of the theatre were formulaic as hell. Shakespeare's comedies are almost the same play over and over again. It was considered a good thing. The audience loved it and came back for more all the time. This play has that same appeal and I have a feeling it's going to have some wonderful legs and get a cult following. It's a sweet treat that will still be tasty even when we’ve come back to it a million times.

Check Them Out Here

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Being a millennial is hard enough without your body turning on you. #mygeriatricuterus

By Ricky and Dana Young-Howze

Venmo: @rndyounghowze

Review 169

I swear that “My Geriatric Uterus” is 500% better staged than most PBS kid shows I’ve seen. We want to call this absurdism but we know that someone might correct us. What I will say is this looked scarily like a lot of the shows I watched after school as a kid. So...my whole childhood was absurdism. That’s it. I’m calling it.

However we love when the absurdism stops and it becomes just about Lormarev. This is where the play shines: when the autobiographical stuff runs cross grain with the absurd depression of millennial existence.

Dana I would really just love to see “Adulting for Millenials: The Netflix Series”. I know the title is pretty self explanatory but I didn’t know that there would be so much vagina in this play. However besides that there are a lot of things that millennials will know all about. Job market, education, economy, all those industries we supposedly killed? All those are touched on in this show and could make up a season of this whole show. We could be here for months!

Lormarev’s puppetry was a very interesting use of Bunraku even though I don’t know if she had the Japanese style in mind when she made this. Even though I know that she was probably going for a hokey public access puppetry style, I could have used a bit more animation with the puppet to give it life. Yeah I know that would mean she would have to wiggle her pelvis around more but I stand by it. Now Lormarev’s delivery and tone are on point. You know that this is a subject that she knows very well and she talks like she is the SOURCE of every word. Thinking back on it I don’t think there was a single time I thought about her performance or how well she acted. Everything seemed like it was happening to her in the moment. That’s a hallmark of every great solo performer: saying the words you wrote down like they were coming right off your brain.

Dana often says that even though they are nonbinary they often still have to die on the hill of being a Black womxn. It was told to them all the time that they were going to age out. The universal nature of this piece makes some of the cis-female speech a bit jarring to them. Even though it’s framed in a cisgender world there is this greater theme that is universal to all millennials of every gender. As two millennials ourselves that have parents in their sixties we could definitely relate to a lot of the themes moving around in the text that Loremarev doesn’t pick up and run with.

Now here is the reason that Lormarev might not want to change a single thing; If her message is “black women have been treated like baby making factories for such a long time” then her geriatric uterus is the reason the factory shut down. Lormarev also seems to be fighting this notion of being a mother vs the idea that she would be putting the child into a system that can’t support them racially or economically. In other words she is fighting against an invisible clock that tells her time is up on something she may not even fully want right now. That is the thing that we end the play on and that seems to be enough rope to keep us connected to this wonderful play.

To see this show for yourself go here.

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Sometimes life, just like a Fringe Show, is just repeated introductions.

By Ricky and Dana Young-Howze

Cincinnati Fringe

I almost feel that I did this show and Martin Dockery a disservice while I was watching it. We had just gotten done with a massive marathon of the Cincy Fringe's Primary line-up and by the time we had gotten to this show we were bleary eyed and our heads were heavy and both of us were nodding off. But still I opened my notebook to a fresh page and pressed play.

And then you're standing there watching a man introduce his own show for about forty-five minutes. You sit there and you watch over and over again how he starts his own show over and over again, now I have to tell you that as he does this he's doing it masterfully. I mean even as I have no clue what's going on I know that it's one of the most well crafted things that I don't know about that I've seen in awhile. His sense of comedy is like the ocean: it's just going to wash over you whether you want it to or not.

But then I found myself getting frustrated. Because this show is just not moving on. Dockery is even mocking you as he brags about the show not even going on. And I started getting antsy. And my eyes were getting heavy and I was really weighing the idea of whether or not to call it a night and start over. But then I fought against it. “Power through it,” I said. If this was a live show you wouldn't be able to walk away and revisit it later. So we soldiered on just like Dockery soldiered on through the Forbidden City.

And I've been saying this thing off and on through the Fringe about not being sure what some of the writers or directors wanted us to feel. And that's a hard thing to get right. Hell I'm a published playwright and I don't get it right. You have to curate that experience that the audience is feeling. You have to picture the play that's being projected on the back of their eyelids as they watch you. And as my eyelids got heavy I was thinking about that very thing. And I saw nothing. Absolutely nothing was screening in the Historic Young-Howze Eyelid Cinema that night.

And the thing that made me want to jump through that screen and throttle him was the absolute amount of frustration that he wanted us to feel. That feeling that we're just not getting started. That feeling that we don't know where we're going. That feeling that we have no clue what is up ahead. And the thing that will absolutely tick me off is if Dockery reads this and gets this knowing grin on his face. The grin of a vindicated man who has irrefutable proof that what he intended is exactly what happened.

And then with only thirteen minutes left to go (I know because I rewatched the entire thing just to confirm) we get blindsided by this beautiful story. I imagine it was in exactly the same way that Martin and Vanessa were blindsided with this child. And I'm sitting there and resisting the urge to do one of two things: flip the table and go “you could have started it right here” or to cry.

And so that's how Martin Dockery created a play that was constructed to take his audience right through the path that mirrored their path to being a family. This is how he created a stunning portrait of exactly how life works. This is how he illustrated the John Lennon Quote “Life is what happens when you're making other plans”. And this is how he led two jaded weary theatre reviewers everywhere he wanted them to go and then blindsided them with a touching ending. Like we were his metaphorical theatrical puppets or something.

Martin Dockery you're a brilliant artist and wonderful storyteller. But I hate you. But I love you. Hope to see you at the Fringe Some day.

By Ricky and Dana Young-Howze

Cincinnati Fringe

Lady Macbeth and Her Pal Megan tries to talk about one of the most infamous female characters in all literary history in a new and profound way. Like most tragic heroines of the Elizabethan Era and centuries previous she is undone by a fatal flaw. We all know that part. Well Megan reveals a crappy truth behind that fatal flaw…

...Her fatal flaw was that she was a woman. In her own words they “always punish a woman for wanting things”. And so Megan starts to unpack the implications of that by re-examining her own life. And this is where we go deeper than profound into genuinely touching territory.

Megan goes through the journey that changes tragic heroines into badass villains. Basically all those changes a woman feels like she has to make to succeed in a man’s world. Do we act like her husband, the manly Thane of Cawdor and tear each other apart? Do we un-sex ourselves to avoid the scrutiny onstage? Or do we reject the scrutiny and be erased from the picture?

To do this Megan laid bare her own life to us. She reveals her raw and uncertain rise in stand up comedy. Seriously she used her own life and airs out some of her dirty laundry: the blood stains, the granny panties, the comfortable hoodie, and the other unmentionables.

Megan gets over the fear of looking bad onstage. She confesses sins, minor moral transgressions, and general meanness. She confesses things that could make her look terrible. People could look at her telling some of these things and lose respect for her. But Megan has decided to run with it and make the personal sacrifice of her dignity to the gods of theatre. And it works!

She also highlights the importance of friendship and community among fellow women. If women stand up for each other and support each other we don't have to come out on the other side with blood on our hands that we can't get out. If we all do that maybe we get a change for the good.

Lady Macbeth and Her Pal Megan makes literature accessible. Megan talks about Lady Macbeth in a way that we've never seen before. She asks us all a simple question: Are Women by the very nature of existing making the same mistakes Lady Macbeth makes along the way? No. We can have our covens, we can make the choice to make a community of fellow women. We can make the choice to have fun. We can make the choice against putting us all down. We can realize that we are enough all on our own.

Lastly Megan is proof that theatre has to cost something for the performer to tell. She had to have skin in the game and something to lose by putting it at risk. That's how she weaves her magic. By telling stories of lying, temptation, panic, anxiety, hope, and objectification she lets us feel that our lives don't have to be neat as women to be satisfying. We get to examine our lives and embrace the chaos too. We don't have to sacrifice who we are to be fulfilled. We just have to reach out to our coven and get our witch on. Heck those weird sisters do survive to the end.

By Ricky and Dana Young-Howze

Cincinnati Fringe

The best thing about Butcher Holler is that they prove that the best stage designers are in our heads. Because we're only seeing where the light directs us and nothing else around them then we have no choice but to fill in the blanks all by ourselves. What we don't know is that this is what we do as audiences all the time.

Why do you think we don't question when an actor on a bare stage says “we’re in the forest”? We don't just suspend our disbelief, we paint the forest in our heads. So in this instance our cerebrum carefully sculpts the cave and chisels the rock. Our brain stem tells us that the walls are caving in because it puts the walls there. We know we're sitting in a chair in a theatre and we're fine but our brains have taken the liberty to collaborate with these artists to help out on the show. The only difference is that our brain is doing it for free whereas the artists get paid. (Hmm… Someone's gray matter is getting robbed.)

There are some simple but beautiful things that they do to help our brains do this. First look at the musicality of their words. Because we aren't seeing much of anything they treat our ears to muddy poetry and some grounding mythology. They talk about the dirt and the mud so we can imagine it everywhere. They talk about the Shawnee so that we can feel an ancient quality to the place and a sacredness in the air. More and more as they keep talking they add more and more to the world around us. And that's more of the world that they can exploit for their purposes.

They also keep you hyped with chaotic movement and speech. Everyone's moving around and their head lamps are shining everywhere and they start at a hyped pace and ramp right up to chaotic. That gets your head whipping around to follow them and their eyes racing. Couple that with your brain telling you “someone turn on the lights I can't see” and you start to feel a bit nervous with them.You might just think you're being antsy but your brain is literally getting jittery in empathy with them.

Speaking of empathy you can even say that the headlamps focus energy. Think of it like an extreme close up in a movie. Wherever that light is pointing is where your focus is. So your brain will start to catch on to intimate details in the story without even knowing it. The side effect to this is that other characters seem to come out of nowhere even when I was watching it on a screen in a lit room. Some scientists call it the “moonwalking bear”. You're so hyper focused on who's talking that you shut it off on anything else. They totally seem to know this and use it to great effect for a couple of scenes.

Finally they use all this to highlight a fragility that you hardly ever get to see in a play with all make characters. You hardly ever get to see weakness, fear, vulnerability, and tenderness on display like this. You probably don't always have to turn the lights off to get it done but you won't see us complaining.

This play touched on a lot of topics that are very relevant for our day and age. You have the fragility of man, safety in mining industries, the respect for the land, and strength of hope. (Also the supremacy of Dolly Parton but that's beside the point). For them to turn the lights off on us is to set off fireworks in our head to give us our own lightbulb moments. Whether we come out feeling disturbed, hopeful, angry, or cathartic we come out different than we did when we started. And that gives me hope that this is a show that will endure long after this present mess is over.

We were going to pick our jaws up off the floor but they disappeared.

By Ricky and Dana Young-Howze

Cincinnati Fringe

The buzz around this show was deafening when Dana and I first started the Cincy Fringe almost two weeks ago. And one thing that we will say starting out is that Queen City Flash’s social media game was a far cry ahead of everyone else. So when we first opened up on a handheld camera panning over the credits we didn’t know what was in store for us but we did get this epic vibe…a camera is walking down the hall and into a closet and then two faces show up on the screen. And then it started with words that will live in infamy with Dana and me forever: “Do you want to tell a story”?

That slow walk to the closet and our glimpse that Trey Tatum was alone in there was a very important step. It's reminiscent of how a magician shows us the “Cabinet of Mystery” is empty before “Wanda the Weirdo” steps out of it. It is important that we are reminded that these two actors are alone in separate houses while performing. Why? Because with what you're going to see in the next hour will either seem like cheating or straight up witchcraft if you didn't.

And so the show started…

My word…

Dana and I were stunned silent. They were able to weave a story that caught your attention from the first walk down Route 666. And all of a sudden this little zoom play went off and something unexpected occurred. They had stage lights! Freaking lights and colored washes behind them! What right do these guys have being both good and putting a conflabbed color wash in a Zoom play!?!

And that's not all they had. Through uses of lighting effects, filters in front of the camera, and using duplicate props and tricks to make it look like they're passing things to each other they created this kind of magic realism that makes you totally forget that they're in separate houses. Your mind can't even fathom that they're more than three feet away from each other. Because if they aren't your brain will explode from the cognitive dissonance!

Trey Tatum and Jordan Trovillion have a crazy rapport which is great because their timing has got to be spot on. Because not only does Tatum have to grab a phone on his side at the exact moment that Trovillion is handing out a phone until it is out of frame where she can drop it, there's a moment when Jordan is tossing him keys and it's just amazing as he actually catches a set of keys that are tossed his way. You know there's a simple answer but your only thought is “this is totally witchcraft”.

And all of a sudden you’re seeing details from them that a normal audience would miss. They can hold things up to the camera. They can do tiny little things that were usually too intimate for even the smallest black box. This means the show is very special. We’re being treated to something genuinely special that we may never see in the same way again. And these two and their director Bridget Leak deserve a ribbon for daring to go there and lay down the gauntlet.

And then there are all the little threads that get set up in the beginning and brought around full circle. I'm not a huge fan of extra complicated exposition but it's a credit to Tatum's craft as a playwright. So when you hear about ice cream cones, sex cults, and postcards each of those places come back to pay off for you in a very strange way!

Even the most random side quests pay off at the end. We have a bet that the lost “silver bracelet” they talk about in a random monologue is different every time and they have a blank in the script to work it in when the time comes. (If that's not the case let Dana down gently we have five bucks riding on this).

And it also had the audacity to be touching. We make a joke because it is easy to make me cry watching a show. I cry at the drop of a hat. But when you get Dana tearing up you have a real winner on your hands. She never cries and she was reaching for tissues with this one.

We got so emotionally invested. They built characters so quickly that we immediately bought into them. And we hands down celebrate that Jordan and Trey don't get together at the end of this! We're so tired of Manic Pixie Dream Girl seductresses and we were afraid of that the minute that she broke into his house and started being witty. So happy to be disappointed in that regard.

This show is the proof that going to the Fringe is about the nuggets of gold shows like this. This is the diamond in the rough that you go to Fringe's for because you’ll never find them anywhere else! They have no right being this good. Now we're not saying that other Fringe Shows weren't equally as good but something about this play caught us off guard.

It's a very heavy play for being so light-hearted. There's a lot of themes packed into this: Love, joy, friendship, camaraderie, loss. But those are the best plays. They make you laugh, cry, punch a wall, maybe all three but in the end you get this release. We got a true catharsis with this piece.