My Sunday at Fringe began with “Next Fall,” a Geoffrey
Nauffts play directed by Thomas Markham and staged at
TheatreROCS. The show is about a group of family and
friends struggling to reconcile differences in faith and sexuality. It opens
with the extremely jarring sounds of a car crash in the pitch black, after
which the scene resolves into a hospital waiting room. Through conversation
between his parents and close friends, we learn that Luke (Michael Flanagan) is
left in a coma after being hit by a taxi.
As his situation grows more grave, his long-term boyfriend,
Adam (Carl Del Buono), must navigate the fact that
Luke’s parents don’t know — and likely won’t accept — the nature of their
relationship.
The play whips back and forth in time, unveiling how the two met
and moved in together. We witness how they’ve often badly handled the facts
that Luke isn’t out to his parents, and that while Luke is a devout Christian,
Adam definitely doesn’t buy into faith.
There’s a genuine sweetness between the two, despite Luke’s
inability to reconcile his own desires with his beliefs about sin and Adam’s perpetual
jabs at religion. There’s some palpable irony in Luke’s insistence that his
faith brings him peace, while it seriously complicates his relationship with
his father and Adam.
The couple are supported by friends Holly (Holly Lowden) and
Brandon (Daniel Mejak), who each navigate ideas about
faith in their own ways, and Luke’s parents Arlene (Mary Megan Bringley) and Butch (John Gaehring).
All of the cast members were quite engaging throughout the entire flow of the
play, and two hours flew by before I knew it. But I have to shout out Del Buono’s excellence in Adam’s moments of hyper drama and
subtle asides alike, and Bringley’s witty handling of
the brassy but empathetic mom.
While the final moments of “Next Fall” are perfect (the way
Adam handles the phone call!), the overall conclusion of the production offers
no resolution, and perhaps rightfully so. The play insinuates a condemnation of
faith for putting genuinely tragic pressures on what are otherwise happy lives,
and more than one character who resists its yoke throughout finds solace in the
word when things are bleakest. But the description of the solace is shallow at
best, served briefly with kind of a shrug. It’s that whole “there are no
atheists in foxholes” thing, I guess.
That’s it for “Next Fall” for this Fringe season.
“Commotion Dance Theater,” which was
held at MuCCC, was a light-hearted performance that
required zero effort to enjoy. Presenters Ruben Ornelas and Laurie MacFarlane,
who have collaborated for more than 25 years, took turns with their dance
pieces. Ornelas performed wheeling, celebratory numbers set to the work of
Chicano poets Joaquin Zihuatanejo and Eduardo Corral,
which was broadcast while Ornelas gracefully swept his feet around the stage
and arced his arms as if about to take flight.
MacFarlane’s performances blended storytelling with interpretive
dance — she told of memories and dreams with both her movements and her voice.
The show concluded with a silly, rambling piece by MacFarlane, accompanied by a
couple of supporting dancers, who with the help of nursery school props
reenacted the freeing absurdities of childhood.
“Commotion Dance Theatre” has ended its run for
this year’s Fringe.
I loved every second of “No More Words,” a near-silent
production by On the Edge Theater Troupe, which was formed out of a theater
class at Monroe Community College. The absolutely gorgeous Prince Street
Chamber at Lyric Theater was the perfect backdrop to the handful of black-clad,
often masked players who pantomimed about a dozen diverse, brief acts, ranging
from exhausted parents taking turns caring for one another, to the terrors of
drug use, to a girl playing a video game and annoying the crap out of her
avatar.
Without a spoken word element, the actors relied entirely on
movement to convey their tales, often engaging in some truly entertaining
over-the-top gestures and expressions. The clever dueling servers
skit had me holding my sides, and I got genuinely choked up by the sweet final
story, which saw an elderly couple seated together reminiscing while other
actors performed their life story in fast-forward around them.
“No More Words” will be performed again
on Wednesday, September 21, at Lyric Theatre: Prince Street Chamber. 8 p.m. $8-$10.
All ages.
This article appears in Sep 14-20, 2016.
