Fringe Shows

Richard and I took in four Fringe shows on Tuesday night with our super-passes! We saw Designed Specifically for a Woman Like You, which was mercifully short: A woman doing her grocery shopping runs into three glamorous women in '50s-style dresses and hairdos. While they follow her around smiling eerily, she tries to tell them about the refugee woman her parents hired as a maid and explain how the woman washed ashore and was later killed in a car crash. The only thing the three women will say is "Congratulations! You've found a protein powder designed specifically for a woman like you!" Weird. Fortunately, I don't have to take all the blame for this one. Richard picked it out. Ha ha.

Our friend Phil was stage-managing a show called Serve, so we saw that one next. It was hilarious! It's about three people who work in customer service: A clerk in a baby-clothes store, a bank teller, and a hoity-toity restaurant waiter. One guy played all the different customers, including a Scotsman who demands stuff unintelligibly, a redneck, and a psychotic old shoplifter. The only character who likes his job is a bartender (played by the customer guy): He always walks into the bar in slow-motion to "Danger Zone". Some of the stuff in this play was SO TRUE. The redneck, for instance: "'Sue me. 'Scue me. Kin ah git any service 'round here or ya too busy bein' stupid?" And the woman who shrieks "I've been shopping here for ten years and you never have ANYTHING I WANT!"
This show was nearly sold out even on a rainy Tuesday!

The third show was a 1996 one-man play called The Key to Violet's Apartment. The guy who wrote and stars in it is a local reviewer/actor/playwright who used to do the show with red nail polish, but he didn't do that last night - probably so he could wander around the Fringe without looking like a freak. The Key is less a play than storytelling. The set is just a curtain made from keys with a stool in front of it. The subject of the play is women. The main character's friend asks him "If you could be a woman, what would you look like?" So he starts reflecting on all those subtle and even meaningless things that make women so alluring and mysterious: Open-toed sandals, perfume, Jean Harlow nightgowns. The story revolves around Violet, an aquaintance; she wakes up one morning to find that all of her shoes have been filled with water. When she tells a friend about it, he confesses that he has made dozens of copies of her apartment key just for the hell of it and handed them out to people as gifts. Many of those people were obsessed with the secretive, fascinating Violet. You never find out where the water came from or why someone would sneak into Violet's apartment in the middle of the night to fill all her shoes with it, but this guy is quite the storyteller. In the end, Violet decides the water-filled shoes were a "romantic" gesture from a secret admirer, the guy who gave away all keys in the first place. She falls in love with him.
The playwright says this is a true story, which is playwright-speak for "I made this up in a bar".

The fourth show won the Best Script award at the Calgary one-act festival this year, but I have to say the acting was pretty flat on the part of one of the leads and the whole thing was pretty dull. Pulling the Wool is a satirical look at network news statistics, in which a poor sucker gets blackmailed into ignoring big stories that could be harmful to the network. Not original and not funny, not even particularly enlightening. One scene - I kid you not - was lifted directly from Steven Soderbergh's movie Schizopolis:

MAN: Generic greeting.
WOMAN: Generic greeting.
MAN: Half-hearted inquiry about day's events.
WOMAN: Standard reply to inquiry about day's events.

Etc.

Attn All Playwrights: There is a difference between an homage and outright stealing, y'know?

So, we had a fun night and we're all fringed out.